Booking Free Flights with Credit Card Points
This post may contain affiliate links, which means I’ll receive a commission if you purchase through my link, at no extra cost to you.
As I’ve gotten more and more invested in travel hacking, I’ve gotten good at figuring out how to accrue points, but redeeming them can be really daunting. I have a huge amount of loyalty to Southwest Airlines and am very well versed in booking their flights with points and because we have the Southwest Priority credit card, the points we earn are automatically deposited in our Southwest account without any hassle. Southwest makes it incredibly easy – if a flight is available to book in dollars, then it’s available to book in points at an average rate of 1.4 cents/point. With every other airline (domestic or international), it’s a bit trickier and honestly, I’ve been nervous to pull the trigger. I ended up booking 2 round-trip flights for an upcoming trip to Europe on Air France for a grand total of 48,000 Amex Membership Points with an approximate redemption value of 4.9 cents/point. I’ve paid more for a single domestic round-trip ticket on Southwest before, so I was thrilled with this value.
If you are sitting on a bunch of points and are looking to redeem, what follows is everything you’ll want to take into consideration to find a flight you can book with points. Note: all the information below applies to both domestic and international travel.
Factors to Consider
Limited Award Availability
Unlike Southwest Airlines who would let every single seat on the plane be booked with points, other airlines limit the number of award tickets in each class. Unsurprisingly, there is usually more availability for economy than business or first class. The number of seats can vary from flight to flight and even from day to day. Usually most of award the seats are available as soon as flights are available to book, which is usually 11-12 months out from departure but more may appear at any time. However, some airlines release seats closer to takeoff – Lufthansa doesn’t release award seats for first class until approximately two weeks out. Because of the limited number of seats, it generally pays to plan your trips well in advance.
Shop Around
If your dates and/or destination are flexible, you have a much better chance at snagging a great reward flight, but you also have to be patient and run a lot more searches to compare your options. Because maximizing my PTO is most important to me, my dates tend to be a lot less flexible, usually flying on weekends and around holidays. However, there is still award space available on peak dates, so don’t get discouraged.
Searching Award Availability
While you can use Google Flights to search for cash flights, you have to go to the airline’s website to search for award flights. Most often, you’ll need to be logged in to see what’s available, so you’ll need to create accounts for airline you want to search through. It’s free and only takes a minute.
Often, you have to search for pricing for a route for just 1 day or week at a time, making searching long and tedious. Some airlines, like Delta, do offer a calendar view of availability on their website, to help you search faster.
Award Charts
When it comes to redeeming points for flights, there is no industry standard. Instead, each airline sets their own rules (and those rules are subject to change at any time). Some airlines have fixed award charts based on miles flown, geographic zones, or peak/off-peak times. These fixed-rate rewards are great because they’re predictable and often a good deal.
Unfortunately, US airlines are largely getting away from this model in favor of dynamic pricing, where the number of points needed for a trip changes day to day just like the cash price. More in-demand routes may have a lower redemption rate than their lesser-flown counterparts.
Once you’ve identified a flight you want to take, Google to see how that airline (or its partner) structures award pricing so you know what to expect.
Booking Through Partner Airlines
Did you know you don’t have to book Lufthansa flights directly with Lufthansa? You can book through United instead. This is just one example of how airline partnerships and alliances can work in your favor. There are 3 main airline alliances: Star Alliance, Oneworld, and SkyTeam.
You can often (but not always) book flights on one airline through a partner. For example, you can book American Airlines flights through British Airways. This may seem unnecessary, but comes in handy when transferring points from credit cards (explained further below). For example, if you have Amex points, you can’t transfer them to American Airlines, but you can transfer them to British Airways and book an American Airlines flight through them. Note that airline points don’t transfer between sites, so if you only have American Airline points, you can’t use them to book on British Airways’ website.
One thing to watch for is that award pricing and availability can vary for the same flight depending on which airline website it’s booked through. A flight that is 50,000 points on one site may be 75,000 on another, so once you’ve identified the flight you’d like to book, shop it around to different airlines.
Phantom Availability
Ghosts are scary, but you know what’s scarier? When an award flight shows availability on the website, but it’s actually just a glitch in the system that could leave your valuable points stranded with an airline you rarely fly. That’s called phantom availability and it’s terrifying.
What can you do to avoid this? One strategy is to call the customer service line directly and verify that they see the award space availability on their end. Cross checking availability across partner airlines as explained above may help as well, but know that airlines don’t always release all their award space to their partners.
Transferring Credit Card Points
If you don’t have enough airline points to book a flight, you can transfer points from a travel credit card that partners with the airline. This makes credit cards points like Amex Membership Points or Chase Ultimate Rewards points incredibly valuable since they can transfer to many airlines and even some hotels. Often, the points transfer at a 1:1 ratio, but that ratio can vary (for example, Amex’s transfer ratio to Singapore Airlines KrisFlyer is 3:2). To sweeten the deal even further, the credit card companies will periodically run transfer bonus promotions where you can get more than the normal transfer ratio. When signing up for travel credit cards, look into who that bank’s transfer partners are to determine if the card is a good fit for you.
The flights I found for my trip added up to 60,000 points for 2 people on Air France’s website, and I could have transferred points from Amex or Chase since they are both transfer partners of Air France/KLM Flying Blue. However, Amex was running a 25% transfer bonus to Air France/KLM Flying Blue, meaning I only needed to transfer 48,000 Amex points to get 60,000 Flying Blue points. My signup bonus alone for the Amex Platinum card was 125,000 points, so I still have plenty left over for future trips.
It’s important to know that once you transfer points, they cannot be reversed. You can also usually only transfer in increments of 1,000 points, so you may have to transfer a bit more than you need.
Amex and Chase both have their own travel portals, but I don’t recommend booking reward flights through them because they will give you a ratio of 1-1.5 cents/point depending on the card you hold and you can do much better by transferring the points to external partners.
Transfer Times
When transferring credit card points, they often instantly show up in your airline account after you confirm the transaction. However, in some cases they can take longer. On Amex’s website, it says AirFrance/KLM Flying Blue transfers can take up to 48 hours. Luckily, my transfer was instant, but some, like Singapore Airlines, really do take days. This can get a little risky because the award seat may no longer be available by the time your points transfer to your airline account.
Some airlines allow you to put an award ticket on hold for a specified amount of time (usually a few days). If it’s available, this is a great way to try to combat the potentially long transfer times.
Taxes and Fees
Award flights are never 100% free, as you always have to pay some amount of taxes and fees. On some flights, this may be just a few dollars, but on others it may add up to hundreds or even thousands.
For example, I was pricing out a flight using points on British Airways and the total roundtrip for 2 people came out to 124,000 Avios points + $1305.74 in taxes/fees. The cash price of that trip would have been $2765.54, so one way to look at that is I essentially would have gotten 1 ticket free and another paid in cash. This would not have been a good use of my points.
If you’re a bit short on points, many airlines provide the option to pay with less points and more cash, though this usually isn’t as good of a deal.
Note: because you have to pay for the taxes/fees in cash, use a credit card that provides the most rewards points on travel purchases. My Chase Sapphire Reserve gives me 3x points on air travel not booked through their portal, but my Amex Platinum gives me 5x points, so I used the latter for my trip, allowing me to earn over 2,200 points.
Cents Per Point
A great way to tell the value of the points you’re redeeming is by comparing them to how much the cash flight costs. To do this, you should take the cash price and subtract the cost of the taxes and fees you’d have to pay for the reward flight (since you have to pay those either way). In our example from above, that would be $2765.54 – $1305.74 = $1459.80. Then take that number and divide it by the number of points needed to book the flight ($1459.80/124,000 = $0.012).
Using that formula, I found that my points would have been worth 1.2 cents/point. While not the worst redemption rate, you can certainly do much better. Here’s how the math worked out for my AirFrance flight:
Cash price: $2772
Reward price: 48,000 Amex points + $443.38
$2772 – $442.38 = $2,328.62
$2,328.62/48,000 = $0.049 (aka 4.9 cents/point)
As you can see, this was a much better redemption rate than the British Airways flight. As a general rule, the absolute worst redemption rate you should possibly accept is 1 cent/point, but you can usually do much better. Higher classes of airfare (premium economy, business, or first class) are easier to get great redemption rates (think 6+ cents/point), but I fly so often that I’d rather fly economy to maximize the number of trips we can take. I personally will pass on rewards that fall under 2 cents/point minimum. I am travel hacking for the long run, so I am not just trying to get my next flight to be free but maximize my overall savings.
Exact Steps I Took to Book
I know all those things to take into account can make redeeming points a bit daunting, but in reality, it only took me a few steps:
- Used Google Flights to see what airlines even fly to my destination and determined Air France had several good options.
- Signed up for an Air France/KLM Flying Blue account since I didn’t already have one.
- Identified the flights I wanted to book. I didn’t call to confirm it wasn’t a phantom flight, but I should have!
- Logged in to my Amex account and connected my Flying Blue account. I then transferred 48,000 points with a 25% bonus and 60,000 points instantly showed up in my Flying Blue account.
- Selected my flight and checked out as normal using my Amex Platinum card to pay for the taxes/fees.
- During checkout, I selected to earn Delta SkyMiles instead of Flying Blue points and entered my SkyMiles number, as I’m more likely to use Delta living in the US. Both airlines are part of SkyTeam, allowing me to choose which airline’s points I want to earn when I fly.
- After my flight was confirmed, I went into my account and updated my travel info (passport information, Known Traveler Number, contact info, etc.) and selected my seats. Luckily, Air France doesn’t charge extra for choosing a seat in advance (except for a few premium seats).
The world of travel hacking is split into two phases: earning points and spending them. Booking flights with points can be intimidating, but once you do it, it is incredibly rewarding (pun intended). Taking the time to learn the tricks can save you valuable points, time, money, and hassle.
You may also like: