How to Book Award Flights
This is the trickier part and this assumes you’ve already earned a boat load of points through credit card signup bonuses, every day spending and earning miles by actually flying. First and foremost, you have to be flexible in the dates and even the places you are going to fly. Want to fly to Hawaii in first class over spring break? It probably is not going to happen. Airlines are in the business to make money and if they can sell seats at full price, they are going to do that. Airlines release seats that you can book with miles based on their expected demand and also sometimes just completely randomly. If they know they are going to sell every seat on a flight for full price, they won’t give away seats that you can book with your miles. That’s where being flexible comes in. Let’s say you live in New York and want to go to London. New York JFK to London Heathrow is one of the biggest and most profitable flights in the world. In 2018 British Airways took in a record $1,000,000,000 on that one route. Yep, that’s billion with a B. Nearly a dozen airlines combine to offer more than 30 flights a day between London and New York.
If you are flexible with your travel dates or just get lucky, you may be able to find seats on American Airlines between JFK and London Heathrow for around 75,000 miles (plus $5.60 in taxes and fees) each way in business class. Another option would be to expand your search to include nearby airports. Philadelphia to London doesn’t have quite the same demand so you might have better luck there. Or you could fly JFK to Dublin and connect to London for the same price. Flexibility is key when booking tickets with miles. Start looking early, and often as airlines release seats randomly from when they first put the flight on sale until it takes off.
Before jumping into how to search for award space, there are a couple things to point out. Most airlines have a set award chart that spells out the number of miles need to fly between certain destinations. Unfortunately, American, United and Delta no longer publish their award charts and use what is called Dynamic Pricing where the cost of a ticket can vary depending on the demand or a number of other factors. That doesn’t mean they don’t ever release award seats for decent prices but just that they have become less transparent. Fortunately, just because you live in the United States, doesn’t mean you have to fly on one of those airlines. There are tons of other options to get a great deal.
The easiest approach to finding award seats is just to pull up the airline’s website where you have your stash of miles, type in your desired dates and destination then click “award search.” You found it? Great, we’re done here. If not, which will most likely be the case, there are some other options for you.
This is where most people get frustrated and think their miles are worthless. The good news is just because you have one airline’s miles doesn’t mean they are the only airline you can use your miles with. Most airlines are members of an alliance. There are three out there and United, American and Delta each belong to a different one. Oneworld has 13 airlines, Star Alliance has 26, and SkyTeam has 19. So if you have United miles, you can potentially use those for travel on one of their partner airlines like Air Canada or even Ethiopian Airways
