Best Points For Your Flights

Now that we are making all of these miles and points with our various cards, we want to use them for travel and free flights.  There are many ways that you can spend your miles and points, but I want to make sure that you are leveraging these to the best possible result.  Because travel is a great way to use your points, I want to show you the best method to transfer your points to the various travel partners and get the top deals. 

Award Hacker

We want to start with www.awardhacker.com  

This website will show us the best way to get from “point A” to “point B” using our miles. 

Say we want to take an economy round trip from San Diego, California, to Bangkok, Thailand.  We will put the information into the appropriate spaces, and if you leave the frequent flyer program as “any” you will see all of the available choices.  ** we will put two stops so that we can see more choices.

The top option is going to be the cheapest option, and for our particular case, the best result is for Alaska Airlines (AS) at 60K miles, and the second-best is Air France at 69K, with Delta in third at 70K miles.  

If we want to change this to a first-class ticket, we can search again, and we find the following:

Four about double the number of miles we have, we can get a First class ticket for 140K on Alaska or Japan Airlines for 170K.  You can see that in all of these cases, the red MB in the next to last column (next to the blue down arrows).  “MB” stands for Marriott Bonvoy, but there are other possibilities that are not highlighted for Membership Rewards(MR Amex), Ultimate Rewards(UR Chase), Thank You Points (TYP Citi), and Capital One points (C1).  

If you only have certain programs or miles, then you can choose specific ones with the dropdown menu.

If we did not have Marriott Bonvoy points, we would choose the Air France flight and could use 69,000 miles from another bank’s card.

Before going on to the next step, I encourage you to go through and play with this tool a bit.  See the functions, how it works, and how easy it is to use.  You can find amazing deals to fabulous destinations (one way) like Paris for only 20K miles on Alaska Airlines:

You can make 20K in a short time with your MS.

US Credit Card Guide

Once you know who has the best deals on flights, you then need to head over to www.uscreditcardguide.com and go to their “Points and Miles” drop-down.  Then you will choose the “Points to Miles Transfer Chart.”

Notice to the right there is also a link to the “Award Hacker” site if you want to access it through uscreditcardguide.com as well.  

The “Points to Miles Chart” is the way to easily figure out how to best move your points for the most return.  

The chart looks like this:

It shows which companies we can transfer between.  If you click on one of the airlines to the right and left, for example, Alaska Airlines, we see that it will only transfer with the Marriott Bonvoy Points.  

However, when we look at Marriott Bonvoy (clicking in the red middle bar), we see that their points can be used with so many different airlines. 

 

The significant part is that, for example, points with American Airlines can transfer through Marriott Bonvoy to Alaska Airlines.  Any points on the list can transfer to the other company’s points system on the same linked list.  Another example would be going from Delta Sky miles to Singapore Airlines through American Express membership rewards.

Using the combination of these two sites, you are able to see how to get the best bang for your buck, all revolving around points.  And then after that, you can see which airlines you can transfer between that you might already have a relationship with.  This could be a choice because of status or a preferred airline as well.  

Going to the Airline’s or Card’s Website

Finally, from here, you are going to want to go to the airline’s website.  If it was for Delta, you could book straight through them, or you can extend miles this way…..  

For example, if you have an American Express Platinum Card, you can call up the American Express Concierge, and you can get an additional 35% back off your points using this method.  Let’s use our example of 20,000 points to go to Paris; if you pay with your platinum card(points), you will get 35% or 7,000 points back for that purchase.  

Pro Tip: Know that the card company will tell you that you can only pick one airline for the 35% points bonus; however you can do it dozens of times throughout the year.  Tell them you didn’t know, and you want to change it, or you have never changed it before, and they usually can’t see the data, so no problem for you anyway.  If you fly business class or better, you will always get the 35% points back no matter what.

This is the way to really take advantage of all that credit has to offer for travel benefits.

Good luck, and God Bless!!!!!

Brandon

Credit Counsel Elite teaches business owners how to get up to $500k every 6 months at 0% interest. Check out CreditCounselElite.com or CLICK HERE to learn more.