De-mystifying Booking Flights With Points
De-mystifying Booking Flights With Points
A guide from a min-maxer
Recently, I’ve noticed an increasing number of friends reaching out to me, seeking advice on how to effectively utilize credit card points to travel abroad. This isn’t surprising, as many of them have spent the last few years obtaining sign up bonuses and building a small nest egg.
Why bother?
On top of enjoying min-max problems, purchasing flights with award points is usually more flexible than purchasing the main cabin fare - with either no to minimal cancellation/change fees, especially for international flights.
Additionally, you are usually given the ability to bring a carry on, check bags, select your seats - which are seen as “premium” options these days. Unlike credit, airline miles rarely expire and can even be used to purchase tickets on other airlines (more on this later).
Anyways, let’s kick this off with some simple terms and concepts to understand:
Tiered Pricing
When airlines release seats for a flight, they organize award fares into different pricing tiers, similar to how concert tickets are priced, with different tiers and categories (e.g. VIP at a concert is similar to Business Class on a flight)
Here are some key terminology for tiers:
Saver Fares (5-10%) - The cheapest of the fares and the base price in points
Main (60%) - After all of the saver fares are sold out, the majority fall into this tier, which is still a fixed price
Dynamic Pricing - The final batch of tickets are sold dynamically, which react to the market cash price, but never dropping below main cabin prices.
Airline Alliances & Partnerships
While each airline sells their own tickets with their own miles, they also offer their partners’ flights in their inventory. If you’ve ever booked a flight on United but flown on a plane operated by ANA or Air Canada, you’ve experienced this.
While alliances and partner availability come with unique rules for each airline, a general rule of thumb is that if two airlines belong to the same alliance, you should be able to book at least the saver fares between them.
Additionally, some airlines have direct partnerships with others outside of alliances (e.g., Virgin Atlantic partnering with ANA), but these are left as an exercise for you (:
How to Search
Here’s my process
1. I use Seats.Aero
Not a referral link - https://seats.aero, it’ll do 90% of the hard work for you. The free tier allows searching several months ahead and setting up email notifications. For longer-term planning, their subscription pricing is reasonable and includes SMS notifications.
A common strategy is to wait for a saver fare to be available because someone cancelled their flight, and to change your existing booking from a more expensive one to the cheaper option.
The only catch is that it doesn’t cover all airports, and routes, which leads me to the second step below.
2. Search all partners for the route
In the remaining 10% where I’m really optimizing my points, or if the route isn’t covered by seats.aero, I will search for all available flights on Google Flights between the two cities and compile a list of the airlines that operate those routes.
With that list, I will search for all partner airlines programs that are able to book them.
Example:
Step 1:
I want to fly from Brussles to SFO, and the only airline available on Google Flights was Aer Lingus.
My research shows that I can book this flight via Aer Lingus Rewards, British Airways rewards, American Airlines miles, and Alaska Airlines miles.
Step 2:
Next, I’ll search every possible booking partner for this route, and document the price + cancellation policy to later optimize.
3. Search nearby hubs
Sometimes it’s more cost-effective to fly from a nearby airport (e.g., Oakland, Los Angeles, or Seattle) to your final destination, or even arriving at a different airport too.
4. Check tips on blogs/Reddit
Look into how other people are routing their way to your ideal destination via Reddit or aviation blogs, as often times you can find sweet spots that are unpublished.
Sample search: “best way to fly to Japan with miles”
Back in 2019, it was possible to book a roundtrip business class flight from SFO to NRT on ANA, via Virgin Atlantic for just 70,000 miles! However, this was only bookable over the phone with a customer support agent, not over the web portal!
5. Booking flexible tickets & setting alerts
If the award program has a flexible ticket policy, I typically will book whatever is cheapest, and set up SMS notifications for a more premium ticket option (or for a more desirable/cheaper date).
Around 2 weeks before departure, additional saver seats may open up due to low demand. Last-minute cancellations can also create opportunities.
My Rule of Thumb
Here are the target prices for when I travel.
Within countries: 5-10,000 miles one way in economy, 20-30,000 miles in business
Within continents: 10-20,000 miles one way in economy, 30-50,000 miles in business
Between continents: 30-40,000 miles one way in economy, 50-75,000 miles in business
Unless you have a Chase Sapphire credit card, you can consider each point as worth 1 penny.
With a Chase Sapphire card, you can value it at 1.25 or 1.5 pennies depending on which card you have, and compare whether it’s cheaper to either book it directly or via Chase.