Many of you have spent years accumulating airline miles. Have you thought about the best way to spend them? Here are a few tips.
When is the best time to buy airline tickets? If you are purchasing airline tickets with cash or credit it often makes sense to wait a while as costs can go down in the months before a trip. See our newsletter on this topic. However, things change if you are using airline miles to obtain your airfare.
While frequent flyer programs vary by airline, most airlines will post their available tickets about a year in advance. Therefore, you have the greatest chance of snagging the best deals or getting the dates that you want the earlier you book your tickets. Yes, sometimes airlines will issue more award tickets if they have excess capacity, but you can’t count on it.
As soon as you know the dates that you want to travel, you should look towards booking your award tickets. This is especially true during holiday periods when demand is high and the awards tend to be less available.
Look for the lowest mileage fares. There tend to be a limited number of seats available at these lower point requirements. If you can be flexible with your travel dates, airports and times, you may be more likely to get these deals. For example, on United, a flight from New York to LA around Christmastime yields a range of miles from 12,500 to 44,000 depending on whether you leave on December 18th vs the 21st.
How do you evaluate whether the Award is a good deal? This can sometimes be tricky. You don’t want to spend a lot of miles for an inexpensive flight. As a general rule, we try to use miles for the more expensive flights or when we can use them to get a first class upgrade. We generally compare the cost of the ticket that we are buying with the number of miles that we need to get the tickets.
For example, if we were flying to Hawaii using United in January 2020, the airfare is about $900 for a round trip economy seat. If we were to use award miles, the cost would be 45,000 miles. Therefore the “return” is 2% or $900 divided by 45,000 miles. That is a pretty good return for your miles. In our experience, anything over 1.5% is reasonable.
Frequently, you can make better use of your miles by using them for first class upgrades. The math gets a bit trickier, but essentially you can compare the difference in ticket cost between first class and coach with the mileage requirement to upgrade. We have seen examples where you can use as little as 60,000 miles to get a first class ticket worth $3000 over the coach fare. This is a return of 5% and a very good deal
Anyway, we are not surprised to see that there are actually mileage award booking services that help people evaluate and find the best way to spend their frequent flyer miles. They typically charge $100 to $150/ticket.
If you are looking to use miles for purchasing tickets for one of our trips, we would be happy to help you evaluate your options.