We sat down with airline rewards program experts to dig deep and find the tricks of the trade concerning airline rewards credit cards. Because everyone loves a free flight and great in-flight perks, right?
You can use these tips from the pros to help you understand airline logic a little better as you start accruing and using your rewards miles.
Foundations and Financial Strategy
#1. Airline Rewards Credit Cards
It’s really important to us to start these tips off with this honest, common-sense advice for travelers: Be knowledgeable about your financial situation and your credit score.
While airline rewards credit cards can significantly boost your travel, they can really hurt your bank, and financial stability if you’re not careful. If that offer that you’re eyeing seems too good to be true, it just might actually be too good to be true. Do you research, know your score and listen to your gut.
#2. Strategize and Stock Up Wisely
In strategizing, consider how frequently you travel, your budget and other factors as you make decisions about which airlines rewards programs to choose.
“Sit down for an afternoon and really plan [your travel] out so that you can make the rewards points work for you,” said Scott Mackenzie of airline rewards website TravelCodex. “If you’re wanting to go somewhere that your points can’t get you, you’re kind of screwed if you’ve been saving those points for two years.”
#3. Know Your Airline’s Partners
That’s right: Your airline rewards could buy you flights with partner airlines to places that your primary airline doesn’t service. The trick is, you just have to know which airlines will accept your rewards miles and you can get up in the air by coordinating those miles.
“Airlines want you to redeem your airline miles at the lowest value,” said Rand Shoaf of WellTraveledMile, a website offering tips for redeeming frequent flyer miles and other travel loyalty programs. “This means the airline may make it harder to find easy redemption options by awarding flight availability to valuable partner airlines or, over time, simply raising the prices for award flights.”
The WellTraveled Mile has a fantastic airline partnerships chart to show you which airlines partner with each other for redemption. Zoom in on this highly detailed chart and figure out which airlines will get you to your dream destinations, whether it’s Indonesia or to grandma’s house for celebrating the holidays.
Accruing and Boosting Miles
#4. Sign-Up Bonuses
If you’ve done the homework and picked out your preferred airline and its partners, sign up.
When Brig. Gen. Glenn Goddard, one of two bloggers that produces The Military Frequent Flyer, was asked about the best time to sign up for a rewards program he laughingly responded, “Yesterday.”
The concensus among the professionals we talked to was that amazing sign-up bonuses start at around 35,000 miles; those massive mileage sign-up bonuses are usually contingent upon a certain number of dollars being spent on the card within a certain number of months after establishing the card. An example would be 40,000 points offered on a Southwest Airlines card when you spend $1,000 on the card within the first three months after sign-up.
#5. Spending
There are a lot of strategies to bulking up rewards points while spending according to Angelina Aucello of the frequent flyer blog Just Another Points Traveler.
Aucello said that one of her strategies is to, “use the right card for every day spending … even the little ways to earn points add up, too.”
With most rewards cards you can take advantage of shopping deals that come from airlines partnering with retailers. With this strategy, if you’re using the rewards card on purchases you make routinely, you may find that airlines sometimes offer three to 100 miles-per-dollar spent on purchases with specific retail partners.
Discounts like these can be found in the online shopping portals hosted by the airline: Alaska Airlines’ “Mileage Plan Shopping” website would be an example.
#6. Eating and Driving
It’s nice to know that you can get frequent flyer miles—sometimes even double miles—for the errands you have to do, meal you have to buy and small purchases you have to make. Used smartly, you can get paid in rewards miles for money that you spend every day for routine purchases like filling up your car’s gas tank. Many of the rewards cards offer double miles at preferred businesses.
#7. Spending Bonuses
OK, the bonuses can get a bit confusing. There are the aforementioned sign-up bonuses and the rewards for spending with standard partners.
Something else to watch for is what we’ll call “spending bonuses,” and it’s similar to the regular partner spending rewards, but with bonuses for select partners. As an example, the Delta SkyMiles Dining program offered card members up to 3,500 bonus miles for three trips to a partnered restaurant in one month. Signing up for shopping and dining programs on your card isn’t mandatory and it is an extra step that you have to complete, but if you’re going to be making those purchases anyway, then it’s worth knowing what your airline offers as far as bonuses if you want to boost your miles quickly.
#8. Buy Extra Airline Miles
In some cases, it’s feasible, or even a good deal, to buy airline miles from the airline to supplement your points.
Gary Leff, of View from the Wing, said that “a strategy sometimes is to buy the points to bump you up to that last bit that you need to claim a reward if the ticket price is out of your budget.”
This is feasible for travelers with a smaller budget who have big travel plans. Most of the experts, though, recommend about saving up those miles for bigger flights.
Redeeming and Maintaining Status
#9. Flying Frequently and Buying Domestic
Most of the experts that we talked to use money out of pocket to pay for most, or all of, their domestic flights.
“I fly a lot and pay for a lot of tickets,” Mackenzie said. “I pay for 150,000 miles a year and earn miles on those paid tickets. I pay for the domestic [flights] and then with my elite status I get upgraded to first class. I use the points I earned on international flights, as that’s a better deal on the redemption side.”
#10. Use the Right Card
This might be obvous, but it bears stating: If you have a credit card with that airline and you use it to buy a flight from that same airline, then that airline is likely to give you double, or even triple, miles for those air tickets you just bought on their branded credit card. This frequent-flying advice is at the heart of most spending strategies among our experts.
#11. Know Your Rebates Rewards
“There’s an important separation to make, first,” said Leff. “You have to separate out the mileage programs.”
As Leff explains, there are two types of mileage programs are available with most airlines: rebate-style rewards and status-qualifying rewards.
Rebate-style rewards are the points that can be used to book award flights and earn travelers’ gifts—like an awesome pair of noise-cancelling headphones—from the airline. These are the type of miles that you’ve been accruing through purchases on flights and shopping from airline retail partners.
#12. Be Aware of Your Status
The other type of rewards is the status-qualifying rewards. These rewards are based on how much a traveler flies with that specific airline each year, which earns you “elite status.”
“The airline is tracking elite-qualifying miles,” Goddard said. “They then say, ‘You’re a great costumer, we’re going to give you more and more rewards.’ At 25,000 miles [for Alaskan Airlines] there’s the silver level, at 50,000 there are the gold and platinum statuses.”
Airline status increases can give travelers access to free cabin class upgrades, boarding priority, airline lounge access and other rewards.
#13. Maintain, and Groom, the Stash
Goddard told us why having a reserve pool of “emergency bank” airline miles is a great idea.
“Normally you plan a vacation several months in advance,” Goddard said, noting that tickets booked far in advance can be relatively inexpensive. “Then there are last-minute situations like funerals or bachelor parties. Last-minute tickets are expensive, but the price of the ticket in airline miles doesn’t usually go up closer to the departure date. If you use your miles this way [for the the last-minute tickets], you can save a lot of money.”
