Hi All, Good Morning!!!

We may have heard about Frequent Flyer Miles or Airline Miles. It’s nothing but the customer loyalty program offered by airlines for its customers. By this, we can accrue miles with one or more airlines. But, do we exactly know what are its benefits? How do we maximize the value of these miles? The answer is ‘No’. Most of us fly with different airlines that offer cheapest rate.Some of us don’t even care about claiming the miles that we flown with that airline.

I will explain how these miles can be valuable by demonstrating a small example.

I want to fly  from US to India on Oct 18. Since I know its going to take approximately 24 hrs(including layover) for the whole journey, I will look for business class tickets.Obviously I will search the price in Google Flights and it gave me an itinerary that costs me $4755 by Qatar Airways.

There are other flight search examples that costs from $2500, but those flights may take more than 30 hours or may require change of airports. So, considering the amount of time, we will consider booking Qatar Airways as an example.

Spending such a huge amount for a one way flight is crazy, unless you are a millionaire.But, there’s another way that you can fly the same flight by spending hardly 5% of the ticket amount. This is where airline miles comes to the rescue.

Let’s assume I am a frequent flier of American Airlines and as a result, I have AA miles say 70k accrued in my American Airlines account.But how do I use these miles for flying another airlines? There are different ways that we can accumulate miles with a particular airline. I will write another blog on how to accumulate miles with an airline of your choice.

I know that American Airlines is a partner of OneWorld Alliance. I can transfer my AA miles to any of the OneWorld partner airlines depending on the award availability. Booking a ticket with airline miles is known as Award Travel. The airlines associated with the OneWorld alliance is shown below;

Now, I know that American Airlines and Qatar Airways are a partner of OneWorld alliance, I can use my AA miles to book award tickets in Qatar Airways. Each Airlines have their own award chart(number of miles required) for flying to different countries.If we look at Qatar Airways Award chart(calculated based on the distance), it requires 170k miles to travel business class as distance from US to India  is approximately greater than 8000 miles.

However, if I look at the American Award chart,I can see that it requires only 70k to travel to India in business class. However,American Airlines website doesn’t show all partner availability tickets in their website for some vague reason.Award Chart of American Airlines is shown below; As you can see, I require only 70k miles to travel one-way business class.

A work around of this is to search award availability in British Airways(partner of OneWorld), which will show almost all partner airlines in which award travel is available in a specific route. I did a similar search as I did in Google search in British Airways website and I can see that business class is available for Award travel in Qatar Airways.Note that, it’s the same flight itinerary details that we got in Google Search.

The next thing is to reserve this itinerary.For that I picked up my phone, called AA customer service, provided the flight details and used  70k miles from AA to book the same Qatar Airways flight that costed nearly $4500.Experts value AA miles from 1.3 ~ 1.5 cents/mile.So if we do the math, we can book a $4500 business class ticket with miles worth $1000 approx. Thus saving $3500. Note that when booking award availability, we may have to pay taxes and other fees which is far less and it depends on airlines.

All I needed for saving such a large amount was to have a strategy, spend some time researching about partner airlines, award availability and some free account registrations with airlines.Hope you find this fascinating and I will return back with tips on how to accumulate miles with airlines so that we can travel for almost free.

See you all next time!!! Cheers!!!