The award landscape is massive, but I still tend to only use three to four different airline programs for my favorite awards. If you’ve read any of my material, it doesn’t come as a surprise that I primarily redeem my points and miles for business class flights.
Despite traveling to regions all across the globe, I still tend to only use three-four programs for as my go-tos. Why do I do this? Well, I try to use programs with the lowest award costs in all cases, and I almost always use programs that do not have any extraneous award fees, if I can help it.
The things I don’t care about in my award program usage are around-the-world trips, multiple stopover round trip itineraries, and generous routing rules. I don’t care about traveling to 50 countries in 5 fives to see a city or two. I prioritize spending valuable time at a destination or two, and then returning back home. The appeal of stopping for a night or two isn’t special to me, unless of course there is a close friend or family member to visit.
So, which programs do I use the most?
My favorites come down to American Airlines AAdvantage, Avianca Lifemiles, Air Canada Aeroplan, and Iberia Avios:
- American Airlines AAdvantage
- Award costs are generally low, and aside from booking on British Airways, there are no fuel surcharges
- Great for flights to Asia, where business class is 70K each way on Cathay Pacific to Hong Kong & Southeast Asia
- Generally not great for Europe, but I’ve had luck with booking awards on Iberia
- The most first class options for redeeming miles on the routes I generally take
- Easy to accrue credit card miles with AA mailers
- Avianca Lifemiles
- Transfer partner of Amex and Citi
- Good award rates, i.e. 78K for business class to Asia
- Great mileage sales, can easily buy miles if short
- Part of Star Alliance, which is the largest airline alliance
- No fuel surcharges on awards – HUGE!
- Air Canada Aeroplan
- Transfer partner of Amex and Capital One
- Very good award rates to Europe at 55K one-way (my personal sweet spot)
- No fuel surcharges on many carriers, i.e. Swiss, United, etc
- Part of Star Alliance, which is the largest airline alliance
- Frequent transfer bonuses from Amex, my favorite currency of the banks
- Iberia Avios
- Transfer partner of Chase and Amex
- Great award rates to Europe, particularly if flying from the East Coast to Madrid
- Part of OneWorld, where I hold status from American Airlines
- Great partner to use to get into Europe
- Low fuel surcharges
In particular, I find that Air Canada’s Aeroplan might be my favorite program in terms of bang for the buck. I’ve redeemed more one-way business class flights with Aeroplan in the last three years than I have of all other programs combined for flights to Europe. That’s saying a lot! I pray they don’t kill the golden goose egg, as I would personally be very affected.
Despite my love of booking award sweet spots, I can’t seem to get myself to book these ultra-niche redemptions for specific one-off uses. The frequent flyer world tends to believe that the “magical” redemption today is a transfer of points to Virgin Atlantic, in order to book a round-trip flights to Japan in First Class for 110K miles. Obviously, this is a great deal. But, you have to want to travel to Japan.
In other words, a lot of the frequent flyer world will use programs for the best redemptions, instead of planning out where you actually want to travel to and using the best award sweet spots to get there.
Yes, my favorite programs have some niche redemptions, but it’s not by design. I travel to Europe and Asia the most, and thus use programs that fit that travel style. I’m not going to book a Virgin Atlantic award to Japan simply because it’s the best deal in travel right now. Nor do I plan on it.