DAY 8 - Earning Miles From Flying: Five Things to Note

The last few posts I made were about earning miles from credit cards specifically, which is how I earn almost all of my miles. However, those of you who fly frequently for business or the occasional paid ticket for vacation should know the basics of earning miles from flying.

There are five main points I want you to take away from this blog post that answer these questions:

• When do you earn miles from flying?
• How many miles do you earn from flying?
• What choices do you need to make when deciding where to credit your miles?

Note #1: You only earn miles on paid tickets.

If you pay for a plane ticket, you earn miles. If you redeem an award, you do not earn miles. This is why most of my earning comes from credit cards because I do not regularly pay for flights.

If your work schedules your travel, you should attach your frequent flyer number to your reservation, and earn the miles flown.

An exception is when award tickets are booked with rewards from cards such as Barclay's Arrival+, Citi ThankYou Rewards Card, or CapitalOne Venture for example. If you redeem an award through your credit card like this, you do earn miles. The reason is that these cards earn points on a fixed value, where you can book a seat on any airline at any time. The airline will see your ticket as a paid ticket, because your card issuer paid cash for the seat when you redeemed your points.

Note #2: Sometimes, the miles you earn are based on the price of your ticket.

Low-cost airlines tend to follow the format of rewarding you based on how much your ticket cost. This is called "revenue-based earning" versus "miles-based earning." This includes Southwest, JetBlue and Virgin America. As an example, Southwest gives you 6 points per dollar you spent.

However, both Delta and United have jumped into this revenue format just this year. With these airlines, you earn miles based on your ticket price, and what your status is with the airline. See Delta's chart below:

Note #3: Sometimes miles are earned based on the distance flown.

Most of are used to airlines that credit us for the distance that we fly. American, Alaska, and others still do this. They also give you a percentage bonus based on your current status and also what cabin you flew: first/business/economy.

You can use Great Circle Mapper to see the distance you flew on a particular route.

Back in the day, rules were laxer, flights were cheaper, and the perks of status were greater. Many people flew the most lengthy route possible without worrying about the destination, just to earn miles and status. This is called mileage running. The point would be to maximize the distance flown based on the price of the ticket. A few of these mileage runs in a year could get you all the way to the highest status level, with only a couple thousand out of pocket. Some people still find joy in this. I'm not one of those people, but to each his own. I'd rather fill my vacation days with real vacations and not sitting on an airplane.

Note #4: Try to credit your miles from flying to a single airline if you can.

The key mistake the average person makes with earning miles from flying is to credit the miles to the airline they are flying automatically.
 
They end up with 10,000 Alaska miles here, 8,000 American miles there, and so on. These orphan miles are usually useless because you need more miles for a redemption. This is especially true for international flights. People credit their European trip to Air France because they flew AF, instead of crediting their miles to Delta--where they already have an existing frequent flyer account.
 
Instead of crediting to airlines you’ll never fly again that have terrible loyalty programs, credit all your miles to their American partner. You can always credit miles flown on one airline to any other airline in its alliance and sometimes to non-alliance partners too. Alaska, for example is not in an alliance, but you can credit American, Fiji Airways, Emirates, and others to them.

These are the big three alliances:


 
To credit miles to an airline simply type in your frequent flyer number with that airline when prompted to provide a frequent flyer number. Usually all of an airline’s partners are part of a dropdown menu at some point near the ticket purchase screen.

Note #5: Not all airline partners within an alliance credit miles in the same way.

If you have a paid flight to Tokyo, you would not want to credit your miles to Japan Airways. You’d want to credit to one of its OneWorld partners with a better program like American or British Airways.

Here is a sample for earning on a Japan Airways flight....

If your flight is in economy fare class K (this information is on your ticket and receipt) you would get 70% of the miles flown if you credit to your American account:



But you would only get 50% of the miles flown if you credited to British Airways (assuming you travel after June 1, 2015):





But if your ticket were in business fare class I, you’d get only 80% of the miles flown by crediting to American and 125% (!!!) by crediting to British.


I’ll talk about airline and hotel status in another post. It is an important consideration in the where-to-credit-miles question for frequent flyers of paid flights, but not for people who fly fewer than 25,000 miles on paid tickets per year.

Like I've said before, credit cards are the quickest and easiest way to earn big mile balances. However, you shouldn’t ignore miles you can earn from paid flights. Make sure that you credit those paid tickets to a frequent flyer program that would benefit you!


Peace, love and an extra pack of peanuts,

LC