Award Magic owner, Brian Cohen, has a new article in Travelgirl Magazine. Read the text here or sign up for the magazine for free travel reporting.
Help! Airline miles are confusing!
If you think you don’t have the mindset to use your miles and points to book flights you are not alone. Many people find the different rules of all the programs mystifying. The fact that you can convert Chase Ultimate Rewards points into United miles to purchase a Copa Airlines flight is complicated! With a little help and some calculation tools you, too, can develop the skill to find the best deal possible.
There are a few simple tips you can use to get started using your miles and points.
- Always redeem for at least 1 cent per point. Some websites like Amazon.com try to trick you into using your points for less than that – don’t do it! When they offer you to use 1000 points to buy an $8.00 item, that is only 0.8 cents per point (800/1000 = 0.8). Oftentimes you can buy the same item on a shopping portal and use your credit card’s website to offset the cost at a better rate (often 1 cent per point).
- Your points may be worth more when transferred to an airline. A $300 United flight could cost you 30,000 Chase points if you redeem for the minimum 1 cent per point. That same flight may only be 20,000 points if you transfer your points directly to United, a partnership that Chase allows (different credit card companies have different transfer partners). If the taxes and fees are about $10, then compare $290 to 20,000 points and you will get a value of 1.45 cents per point.
- Airlines nowadays have different levels of award ticket pricing. You want to try to get the cheapest one, called Saver, as much as possible. Those are often released 330 or 355 days in advance, depending on the airline, but can come up again as the supply and demand of flights changes. Keep checking back to see if you can get it.
The best method to leverage your points for higher value, however, are the airline partnerships. I recently used 55,000 Chase points transferred to Virgin Atlantic to book an Air France flight from Paris to Johannesburg in business class. Normally, that would cost 90,000 Air France miles or more (or over $4,000 if I bought the ticket outright). When calculating the value of each point I used, it comes to 7.27 cents per point!
These partnerships often are within airline networks (United is in the Star Alliance, Delta is in SkyTeam, and American Airlines is in OneWorld). When looking to book flights internationally, it can often be better to use American AAdvantage miles to book a British Airways flight than using BA Avios for the same ticket! Sometimes, though, individual airlines have their own partnerships. For example: Air Canada partners with Etihad and Emirates, offering much better deals on those carriers than if you were to book directly with their own miles.
There are a lot of rules and policies to navigate when trying to maximize your award miles – and they change constantly. Get in touch if you want us to help; there is a reason our company motto is Maximize your points. Minimize your hassle.
