For the last part in the booking award flights with points and miles series, this article will focus on the award flight search process. It’s extremely helpful to familiarize yourself with the programs you plan to use by signing up for their loyalty program. I recommend searching proposed routes on the search engines of the programs you may use to understand their pricing structure.
Earning transferable points will make the process much easier as you’re not limited to one airline program. With transferable points and their airline partners, you open up a multitude of routing options. As an example, I booked my Delta flights to Italy by transferring Chase Ultimate Rewards directly to Korean Air. Knowing Korean Air has the best redemption for my route, I saved a ton of points.
Once you’ve started earning transferable points, I recommend using Wikipedia to search for potential airports and airlines serving the area you need fly to. For Italy, Milan (MXP), Venice (VCE) and Rome (FCO) have non-stop flights to the east coast. By reading each airport’s Wikipedia page, I determined Venice and Rome made the most sense for our travel plans.
If you’re like me and enjoy learning how many miles an airline program requires for your route, you’ll love using Award Hacker. The upside with this platform is that it’s free and shows most airlines and the points required for a route. The downside is that not all airline programs are listed like Etihad, which may leave out high value redemptions.
In order to avoid missing out on those high value redemptions, I turn to a trusted search engine. Using Google and Google Flights has helped me to understand the best points/miles to use and the cost per point of a flight I may book. I will research the best points/miles to use first and then compare those results with the cost of those same flights on Google Flights. You’re aiming for expensive flights with low point/mile requirements to maximize your value.
Award Search
After I’ve completed the previous steps, it’s time to focus on the award flight search. Let’s reference the Italy flight I booked as it covers several aspects of a redemption. As a reminder, I booked non-stop Delta flights from the east/central US to Italy. The goal was to minimize both points/miles and out-of-pocket spend required.
Korean Air has the lowest business class points/miles required from the east/central US to Italy. Korean Air is in the SkyTeam alliance along with Delta. Chase Ultimate Rewards (URs) has nine airline partner, one of which is Korean Air. With URs, you can book Delta flights by transferring URs directly from Chase to Korean Air. You can also book any SkyTeam airline with Korean Air miles.
Richard Kerr from The Points Guy has an informative article on the best airline sites to search for SkyTeam availability. Knowing that I needed to fly Delta, I searched every route from the east/central US to both Venice and Rome. Delta doesn’t publish award charts so you will want to look for ‘LOWEST FARE’ availability similar to what’s shown below. I recommend searching one-way for all flights.
Another option for your SkyTeam award flight search is klm.com. I prefer KLM’s search over Air France but keep in mind that both airlines use the Flying Blue loyalty program. Flying Blue is also a Chase Ultimate Rewards airline partner. With the KLM site, look for the ‘Lowest Fare’ dates which have a navy outline identifying the lowest number of miles required. The flight will be booked through Korean Air so disregard the fees shown.
The last step in the award search flight process is to confirm the flight you found on delta.com or klm.com has availability on Korean Air. I chose July 22 as both calendars show that date requires the least amount of miles. Sure enough, after running a search on koreanair.com, the Korean Air site lists that non-stop flight confirming availability. From here, I would call Korean Air who will ticket the award flight.
Conclusion
Booking an international itinerary requires a significant time commitment but becomes more efficient with additional bookings. I ran into many roadblocks and headaches during the award flight search to Italy but the building blocks for booking future flights are now in place. I now understand how to determine the least amount of points/miles required and where to search for availability making the process easier.
What’s your process for searching for an award flight? Do you have a list of steps that work for you? Please let me know in the comments or by sending me an email pointswitq@gmail.com.
Thanks for stopping by!
