A Search for Award Flights

Garden of Eden on the Road to Hana (Maui)

Join me as I search for award flights!

Sample Desired Trip: A few days in Chicago (from Seattle)

Background: Let's pretend you only have Chase Ultimate Rewards to work with (think of this as "points currency") because you're a points and miles newbie and have 100K+ transferable points that you earned from opening a Chase Sapphire Preferred card and you don't know what to do with them! 

Goal: To see if you can book an award flight (at the lowest points price possible) by transferring your UR points to one of Chase's transfer partners.

Prerequisites: A chunk of time set aside to sit down and do a bunch of internet searches AND you've signed up for loyalty accounts with ALL THE PARTNERS. Hyatt, United, Virgin Atlantic, British Airways, etc. It's free! This is an important step before you can book with points and miles!

Warning: The approach I am sharing here is the most time consuming way to search for award flights, but it's free. There are services out there that can do the searches for you, but they require monthly membership fees and they are not perfect. Since time is money, maybe it's worth the cost! 

Today's example is inspired by a last minute trip my friend wanted to take in the next couple of weeks, so this method makes sense. But if you are in the planning stages of a bigger trip in the future, perhaps it makes sense to purchase an award flight search membership for a couple of months once you're ready to book, and then you can monitor the prices for a little while.

Step 1: Do a one-way search on Google flights with your desired destination and date. 

The purpose of this step is not to book a cash flight but to explore the different itineraries available as well as your options with different airlines. Google shows the top flights based on price and itinerary. In this case, the three best flights are nonstop departing in the early afternoon, arriving in the evening, and cost about $320 for basic economy. We also have five+ airlines to choose from.

Step 2: Do the same search directly on airline websites. 

Note: This example will focus on discovering your options when you have a fixed date. If you have more flexibility with dates, then you can use the the airline's search tools to look for the lowest points/miles prices over a period of time, such as one week or an entire month.

In this case, because we're working with Chase UR points, if you book directly with one of the airlines listed in the above screenshot, you are limited to those that are Chase transfer partners: Southwest and United. Unfortunately, these don't always have the best redemptions. Fear not! You may still be able to book an American, Delta, or Alaska flight using Chase Ultimate Rewards! I will get to that in Step 3.

Let's open a new tab and start with Southwest. I see the 1:10pm flight, which is listed #1 in the Google search screenshot above. It costs 24,500 points. I can already tell that this is a bad redemption/use of points, so I would not book this flight unless I had Southwest miles I needed to get rid of. How do I know it's bad? Because it's only a 1.28 cents-per-point value. 

How did I calculate the cents-per-point value? Take the cash price ($320) and subtract the cash cost of the taxes you'd pay in addition to the points (the $5.60 shown in the screenshot below). Then divide that value by the points price and then multiply that value by 100, so: $314.40 ÷ 24,500 points X 100 = 1.28 cpp. The goal is to redeem your points only when you can get AT LEAST a 2 cpp value. (More thoughts on that later.)

Now, open a new tab and let's check United. (Note: I've heard you shouldn't sign in to your United account when you do this search, so I didn't.) I spot the flight listed #3 in the Google search and it's 32,500 points, which is worse than Southwest, so that won't do. But did you notice in the screenshot below that the redeye at 11:45pm is only 15K points + $5.60? And it's also marked as a "Saver Award"? (More on that in Step 3.) Switching to my Google tab, I scroll down and find that the cash price for that flight is $320 for a Basic Economy fare and $365 for a regular economy fare. Because a United award fare is equivalent to regular economy, that's a 2.4 cpp value (rounded up from 2.396)! If you don't mind a red-eye flight, this is a great deal!

Step 3: Check airline partners for even better deals.

Remember how I told you you could book that American Airlines flight even though AA is not a Chase transfer partner? (Currently, the only way to book a flight using American Airlines miles is to hold an AA credit card, fly AA, or have a stash of Citi Thank You points.) Well, you may be able to book it through the British Airways website, which IS a Chase transfer partner. That's because BA is in the same airline alliance as Alaska and American. 

I open a new tab, do a search on British Airways, and I see one AA flight available. It's not one of the "top flights" listed on Google flights, but its at least not a redeye! It costs18K points + $5.60. That's more points than the redeye with United, but it's still a decent deal! Just like the United flight, the cash price for that flight is $320 for a Basic Economy fare and $365 for a regular economy fare, so this flight is about a 2 cpp value (rounded up from 1.996)!

Now, because Qatar Airways uses Avios (the same currency as BA) and is also in the One World Alliance, I open another tab just in case the points price is lower there. This is worth a shot because that's how we saved 16K points on our outbound flight to Maui. After logging in, entering an access code sent to my email, and a quick search, I see that no awards flights are available.

OK, let's get back to the part about the United flight that costs 15K points being a "Saver Fare". That means United released those fares to their partners in the Star Alliance. Guess what, Air Canada is also in that alliance AND it's also a Chase transfer partner. So we open another tab, and do a quick search on Air Canada. The redeye with United shows up, but it also costs 15K points + $5.60, so there's no points or taxes savings there. (Depending on the route, Air Canada sometimes does show a lower points price for United flights, so it's worth a try.) If that flight works for you, it's better to book it directly on United's site.

Next, let's not forget that there is a Delta flight that could work too! Delta is an Amex transfer partner, but it's in the Sky Team alliance with Virgin Atlantic and Flying Blue (KLM and Air France), which are, you guessed it, Chase transfer partners! So we open a new tab, log in to Virgin Atlantic, enter an access code sent to my email, and do a quick search. For Air France, I've read you need to use the mobile app to search domestic award flights because you get an error message on the website. Anyway, my searches yield no results, and the Delta site doesn't indicate "Saver Fares" the way United does, so there's no way to know if the partners sites will have them, as far as my limited understanding goes. You just have to take a chance and do more searches. 

Finally, that Alaska flight from the original Google search (#5) was not on the BA site, which means Alaska did not release it to its partners. On the Alaska site, however, the 8am flight costs $395 or 25K miles + $6, which is 1.556 cpp. If you have a stash of AS miles (from flying AS/having an Alaska card) or a stash of BILT Rewards, you could book this flight.

Step 4: Repeat steps 1-3 for the return flight. 

After a quick search, I check to see the prices for return flights a few days later. I go straight to United and don't bother with all the other sites, especially because BA uses a fixed award chart for these flights, so I already know they are going to be 18K points and not worth it based on the cash prices I am seeing on the Google search. I see a few United flights for 15K points + $5.6, and the cash price is $274, which is only a 1.8 cpp value (rounded up from 1.789). It's not ideal but also not a terrible redemption.

Then I check the prices for the next day and see that that cash price is at $189 for basic economy. The points prices I'm seeing for that date are just so not worth it. At this point, you have a few options:

• One, skip the trip and save the points. 
• Two, if you really want to make the trip happen, don't want to spend cash, don't mind using points (but want to spend the least amount of points possible), and you don't mind a redeye, book the United flights! If you average both legs, it ends up being a 2.1 cpp value. ($627.8 ÷ 30,000 points X 100 = 2.1 cpp, rounded up from 2.09) Even the AA flight booked via BA for the outbound and the United flight for the return flight would be a 1.9 cpp value. That's pretty good!
• Three, book the outbound flight with points and just pay cash for the cheaper return flight a day later. That's still a savings of $365. Not bad!

When you're ready to book, you log in to your Chase account and transfer your points to the desired partner. (I'll try to take screenshots of this process the next time I make a transfer.) Then you log in to your account on the partner site to check your points/miles balance. Once there, you add the flight to your cart, and at check out you pay with points (plus cash for taxes). I recommend you only transfer points when you're ready to book. Once you transfer points to a partner, you can't transfer them back to Chase.

Final thoughts: Many people in this points and miles game advise that if you can't get at least a 2 cpp value, you should save your points for a better redemption and book the flight or hotel room with cash instead. But at the end of the day, there are other factors to consider. For example, if I have a stash of Alaska miles AND I really want to take the trip AND I really want to keep more cash in my pocket, I'd consider booking the flight that's only a 1.5 cpp. Otherwise, I'd save the points for another time because Alaska miles don't expire. (Chase URs also don't expire, as long as your account is open and in good standing.)

I hope this is helpful!