Most of the people who redeem frequent flyer miles for an airline ticket will do so to travel on the airline that sponsors the program. Skymiles members will book a flight on Delta, AAdvantage members will book flights on American, and so on.
Once you start to learn more about using your miles and points, you soon find out that the best redemptions for your miles aren’t with the sponsor airline but with their alliance or non-alliance partners. At first, it’s a difficult concept to understand; I remember the first time I told my father he could use his Skymiles for a flight on Korean Air.
You first need to learn the basics of airline alliances. After that, you’ll need to get an idea of award charts, or at least what awards should cost for the airlines who no longer publish award charts. For those who don’t want to put in the time, there are always award booking services.
While the reward for booking an award with a partner airline can be great by either saving you thousands or ten-thousands of miles, creatively using transferrable credit card points on airlines not available otherwise or flying on an airline with a much better product, the process does involve additional risk.
Continue reading “A Risk Of Booking Airline Awards With Partner Airlines”
