Booking Award Travel on the Major US Airlines

Making the most out of your earned points often means you should have a look at transfer partners that offer the best value for your points. For example, it is almost always a better deal to use United Mileage Plus points by booking an award flight with an alliance partner like Austrian, rather than booking flights with United. Understand more on this topic by reading our introduction to awards bookings.

In this article, we'll be covering how to use frequent flyer points on the four major US airlines:

• Delta Airlines
• United Airlines
• American Airlines
• Alaska Airlines

If a majority of your miles are earned through flying rather than credit card spend, then it makes sense to accumulate miles in a single program, where flying accounts for the majority of miles earned and where an airline co-branded credit card acts as a complement.

Delta SkyMiles - Dynamic pricing means deals are hard to find

The SkyMiles program has received big praise for its treatment of Elite members, mostly with regards to upgrades. The area where the program has received some flack is the actual value of their miles. Delta has consistently devalued its miles and recently went as far as doing away with award charts completely. Instead they now offer a dynamic pricing model for all awards, both on their own flights and on partner airlines.

Dynamic pricing offers customers more choice and better availability but it’s not necessarily a good thing for those looking to maximize the value of their points because it becomes more difficult to find deals.

SkyMiles awards range from a very modest 4,500 miles for a domestic one-way ticket, e.g. Los Angeles to Seattle in economy, to upwards of 500,000 miles or more for a one-way business class ticket on most routes, which in Delta’s case is on their longest flight from Atlanta to Johannesburg.

Go for Delta partner airlines

Much like in our example of Virgin Atlantic’s Flying Club program, the best value for Delta SkyMiles is for redemptions on partner airlines, which in this case includes Virgin Atlantic:

• A round trip business class redemption from the US to Europe will set you back 210,000 SkyMiles (at the very minimum) if you elect to fly on Delta.
• On a partner airline however, the same redemption will set you back a mere 150,000 miles. Incidentally Virgin Atlantic is a great partner for these redemptions as Delta (unlike Virgin) does not impose those hefty fuel surcharges that we discussed earlier.

In short, the Delta SkyMiles program is not best suited for aspirational redemptions in first or business class because of the low value of their miles, but also the fact that the SkyTeam Alliance doesn’t allow first class redemptions from airlines that don’t offer a first class cabin. So, you can't book Air France La Première with Delta miles for instance, because Delta does not have a first class cabin. Finally, the SkyTeam Alliance itself doesn’t contain many airlines that we would consider as aspirational, e.g. those offering superior inflight products. The only truly aspirational product in the alliance is Air France’s La Première First Class, and that is unfortunately very difficult to book with miles.

American Airlines AAdvantage - Low award prices and low fuel surcharges

AAdvantage is the frequent flyer program of American Airlines, a member of the OneWorld Alliance. What sets AAdvantage apart from its competitors Delta and United, is the fact that they are still using a traditional award chart for their award pricing as a complement to their newly implemented dynamic pricing, so there are sometimes good deals to be had (want to understand more about award charts and pricing? Have a look at our introduction to award booking here).

Additionally, American does offer flexible award pricing on their own flights where members are able to find redemptions priced well below the published rates in the award chart. These redemptions are called “web specials”, which may present opportunities to fly first class to destinations in Asia and Europe for as low as 60,000 miles one way.

The AAdvantage program maintains relatively low award prices compared to Delta and United, in particular for redemptions to North Asia where it’s possible to fly for as low as 80,000 miles one way. AAdvantage is also the first of the US major airlines to remove change and cancellation fees from award tickets, meaning that you can cancel your award and reinstate the miles at no cost.

In addition to low award rates, Advantage also doesn’t take out fuel surcharges on most airlines

This adds a significant amount of value to the program. The only partner airline that does take out fuel surcharges is British Airways where you can expect to pay upwards of $1,800 for a round trip in business or first class between the US and Europe.

One notable downside of the AAdvantage program is the lack of credit card partners. In fact, AAdvantage miles can’t be transferred from any of the major credit cards, and the only way to earn miles is via American’s co-branded Citibank MasterCard. 

United Airlines MileagePlus - Variable pricing makes it difficult to find deals

MileagePlus is the frequent flyer program of United Airlines, a member of Star Alliance. MileagePlus is a transfer partner of Chase Ultimate Rewards which transfer at a 1:1 ratio.

MileagePlus used to be considered one of the best frequent flyer programs in the US, but over the years United has made devaluations to the program, both in terms of earnings but also redemptions. United switched to a revenue-based earnings model in 2015 and a few years later they also moved over to a flexible pricing structure with no published award chart.

Having a flexible pricing structure unfortunately means that awards on average tend to get more expensive, particularly when looking at long haul redemptions. United previously charged 60k miles for business class to Europe at the Saver level, but now with the flexible pricing you can expect to pay upwards of 75k miles for the same flight. More on this here.

Variable pricing on partners as well

Star Alliance partner awards with MileagePlus did maintain fixed pricing levels for a time, albeit with no published chart. However this also was changed in March of 2020 when United decided to introduce variable pricing on partner flights as well, representing a major devaluation in the MileagePlus program as it means that you are now no longer able to accurately predict the cost of an award ticket.

While the award rates are high, there is still some value to be found in the MileagePlus program, especially when it comes to the free stopover benefit, which is also known as the explorist benefit. That essentially means that the stopover leg on a 3-leg award ticket costs 0 miles. For instance, say that you are planning a trip to Europe with an outbound NYC-CDG and inbound FCO-NYC, the flight between Paris and Rome will cost 0 miles if it’s all booked as a multi-city itinerary. MileagePlus also doesn’t take out fuel surcharges regardless of airline flown, which adds some significant value to the program.

Alaska Airlines Mileage Plan - Some unique partnerships offer great value

Mileage Plan is the frequent flyer program of Alaska Airlines. At the time of writing (Dec 2020), the airline is not a member of a global airline alliance, though they are in the process of joining OneWorld. Alaska Airlines miles are somewhat hard to accrue using credit cards as they don’t partner with any of the major banks, instead your only option for earning miles is by using their own co-branded credit card. Airline co-branded credit cards are typically not as good as a transferrable points card from Chase or Amex, mainly because they only only earn one mile per dollar on all purchases. For comparison the Amex Platinum card can earn up to 5x miles per dollar on certain bonus categories.

What makes Alaska Airlines unique is the fact that they have a number of different partnerships with airlines from many different alliances, some of these include Singapore Airlines, Emirates and Cathay Pacific, which are regarded as some of the world’s top airlines. These partnerships make it possible to earn and redeem Alaska miles on their flights, which is where a big portion of the value of the program lies.

Similar to American Airlines, Alaska still uses the traditional fixed award charts for its partners and each partner has its own award chart.

That's it, chat with us if you need help

This concludes our article series on how to put your points and miles to best possible use. We hope you have found these pages useful and of course, as ever, in case you prefer handing off this entire process to the pro’s, we’re a chat away and standing by.

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