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Which Airline Rewards Programs Are the Most Rewarding? - SmarterTravel.com
It is no surprise at all which two airlines are far at the bottom.
It is no surprise at all which two airlines are far at the bottom.
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Don't fly with Delta, and I am glad that US Air & United didn't merge. Continental is a much better choice for MP member
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There's a huge drop from AA, with award tickets available 57.9% of the time, to Delta, 12.9%, and USAir,10,7%.
I was surprised to see AA and United down as far as they were because we've almost always been able to find seats available when we needed them. Granted it wasn't always the best flight times but, there were seats available. Now with USAir, formerly America West, I always found the FF miles mostly useless and didn't fly them very often. Delta obviously is just a little better than USAir but, with award tickets only available just under 13% of the time, they fall into the same useless catagory at USAir.
Delta was cheap to fly but, the others aren't that much more expensive. Delta's FF program is almost worthless and, their customer services hasn't been all that great. Even though we don't fly all that often, we've begun looking more towards American, United and Frontier to get us to our destinations.
Sure if Delta is cheap enough we'll fly them. The alternate is Airtran and, while they're a decent enough airline, their expiring credits mean we never build towards a FF ticket, even if I have to pay 40,000 to 50,000 miles to get the award ticket. Between those two, some miles are better than no miles.Our timeshare and other photo's at http://dougp26364.smugmug.com/Comment
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I don't know what to make of this or if any of these type of reports can be trusted. Judging by my experiences below, these surveys may be accurate, but very definitely, YMMV.
I'm not a real frequent flyer, I've never flown much for business and make, on average, probably 3 to 5 flights a year for pleasure. But my experience is for the most part in stark contrast to the results of the survey. Here is my experience on four recent FF tickets:
I'm leaving for Europe next month, I booked FF business class tickets on Delta for MSP to AMS via DTW with a return nonstop from AMS to DTW. I was able to book the flight at the 100K miles rate, the lowest tier for both my wife and myself.
I had some, what I will call, nuisance miles on two airlines, roughly 30K miles on both AA and USAir. I wanted to go to Vegas in Dec. and was able to get a tkt from MSP to LAS, again for the lowest fare of 25K miles on AA, on short notice. I booked the flight less than a month before I left.
I wanted to go to MIA, because my wife found out she had a rare business meeting there. I was hoping to get rid of my USAir miles because they aren't exactly a major player out of MSP. I checked on line and was again able to book short notice (within a month--in high season, Feb 8th of this year) for 25K miles rt from MSP to MIA via CLT. Admittedly it wasn't non stop but the times were convenient and besides, I believe, USAir doesn't fly direct to MIA from MSP. I could believe that MSP to CLT on USAir isn't a real popular route with the rank and file of USAir customers, and so might be relatively easy to obtain, but my guess is that CLT to MIA is very popular, at least with USAir as it one of their hubs and I was able to book that.
Speaking of Delta, I am looking to return to Hawaii next March and so I looked into using them to fly FF business class. Again, I was able to book MSP to HNL via SEA outbound and the non stop HNL to MSP for the lower tier price of 75 Kmiles for my wife and I.
Again this is hardly an exhaustive study, but OTOH, it is my random experience on 4 independent instances, and surprisingly includes the bottom two airlines, Delta and USAir on 3 of the 4 examples.Comment
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Your report is contrary to those of lots of experienced flyers over on Flyer Talk:
What airline would you consider the stingiest in allocating award seats? - FlyerTalk Forums
In some ways your Hawaii experience is not that surprising. That is the one route that DL seems to come through the best. Anywhere else outside the continental United States is their very worst area.
With NW miles, I had no problem with high season ff TATL (trans-Atlantic) tickets at 50K miles. Enter DL, and suddenly 50K becomes 60K and tickets even at that level become extremely rare in high season. In my wife's account, we had almost 100K miles earned at NW, which would have been 2 TATL ff tickets in high season. With DL we felt lucky to be able to burn 75K for a shoulder season TATL ticket with awful routing, including overnight layovers both directions, leaving 24K orphan miles. DL SkyMiles are the Zimbabwe dollars of the sky.
I was a DL gold medalliion for quite a few years before bailing out to NW during the Rob Borden reign of terror at SkyMiles. Before Borden and his successor, Jeff Robertson, who is even worse than Borden, what was a great DL ff program went horribly downhill. It was once a great incentive program. Now it is a huge disincentive to ever fly DL and I avoid that airline like the plague. I would rather fly US as at least there, I can put my miles into a decent program, CO.
Originally posted by mas View PostComment
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YMMV, it all depends on what you need and expect. Being an up and down the East Coast flier, I am CP on US. With the demise of Independence Air, $ tickets on my most traveled 495 mile route have gone from $200RT to $500-$1000, but I can always get FF tix for only 20Kmiles!... not enough time for all the timeshares ®Comment
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We belong to the rewards programs with Southwest, Alaska, American, Continental, Jet Blue, and Mexicana. I never consider the rewards when picking our flights. Our first consideration is always schedule and comfort. Therefore we tend to not fly any one airline enough to get the free flights anymore.
We did attain elite status on Alaska and Southwest and received many free flights. That was when we lived in both the SF Bay area and San Diego and we frequently flew back and forth between the two. That was with Southwest. We attained that status with Alaska when we flew back and forth between Spokane, WA and our home in San Diego. We also had elite status with Reno Air because of our numerous flights between San Jose and Las Vegas and Reno. Reno Air was very good but was acquired by American.
From our personal experience with Southwest and Alaska, I agree with the ratings. They were both good but Southwest was the best. With Southwest you basically received rewards equal to a totally unrestricted full fare ticket and could be used anytime to any destination. We even received a $400 voucher from Southwest because we volunteered to be bumped. Now that is not unusual except we were flying on free SWA rewards tickets and were only delayed getting to our destination by 45 minutes.JohnComment
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I am very loyal to Southwest.
As a family of 3 we hop on a plane 4 possibly 5 times per year. We typically don't pay for flights because we have Rapid Rewards credits. Actually, any day now I am expecting some points to post and I will get a Companion Pass. My Companion flies with me free for the next year - even if I use a Rapid Reward for my flight. How better does that get?
Crazy thing.....they allow credits from all parter purchases. I acheived this by using my SWA Visa for all purchases, some flights and signing up for specials from time to time.
As for availablilty - we have received what we wanted about 95% of the time. The other 5% was easily fixed by converting regular rewards to freedom rewards. Then the flights were available for booking.
Actually, if anyone is thinking about signing up - they are offering bonus credits for referrals. Please let me know!Comment
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The only drawbacks to SWA that I can see are that credits expire and cannot be extended, and, the biggee, they do not fly overseas nor have any partners which do. Now, once RyanAIr sets up the TATL (trena-Atlantic) LCC they have announced, I could see a partnership of SWA with that airline and some of the European LCC's.
Personally, my favorite has been BMI, on which I can get a OW intra-Europe flight for either 4500 miles or 6K miles depending on the route, and that also applies to their *A partner flights as well. I have been getting over 9 cents a miles value from my BMI miles. I have not used them for TATL flights, but again they have avavilibility on all *A carrriers and at 45K miles, less than any US-based airline. Availibility is great. Several times I have booked the Friday evening flights to Vienna on Austrian that very often sell out of paid seats for 6K BMI miles and at a point in time when the lower fare buckets of paid tickets have already sold out and paid tickets are going for a minimum of $5-600 OW. Best of all, BMI has great ways to get miles from partners, I have not flown a paid BMI flight yet.
Originally posted by mdurette View PostComment
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