Author: Jason Steele / Source: Wise Bread
Racking up airline points by flying or using travel rewards credit cards is fairly easy, but redeeming them for award flights can be more challenging. It can be hard to find available award seats using the airline’s search functions, and it takes time to pore over multiple partner airlines’ websites and consider different routing options.
Thankfully, there are services that can help you get the most value out of your reward points and miles. For a fee, you can hire a professional award booker to find and book your award, saving you not only time, but sometimes points worth hundreds of dollars.
The challenges of award booking
When you have reward points or miles with a single airline, at first it might seem like a straightforward process to redeem those miles for an award flight. When in fact, it can be difficult, confusing, and time consuming. First, you might try to use the airline’s website. However, these websites may not show most of the airline’s partner award flights.
For example, the American Airlines AAdvantage program only allows you to redeem miles online for flights on American and seven of its partners. That leaves over a dozen other airline partners that you can only call to book, including Cathay Pacific, Japan Airlines, LATAM, and Etihad Airways. (See also: How to Get More Value Out of American Airlines Miles)
But even if the airline claims to show all partner awards, its website might not actually display what you are looking for. For example, some airlines will only show itineraries with a certain number of connections.
If your itinerary requires you to make more connections than the website will display, then you will be unable to book your award online.And if you do call the airline to get help with award booking, you will often reach indifferent customer service agents who may have little training and even less incentive to spend time on the phone helping you redeem your points and miles.
This task becomes exponentially more complex when you’re trying to redeem reward points in a flexible program that allows transfers to multiple airline partners. For example, one credit card rewards program lets you transfer your points to miles with nine different airline programs, while another has 16 different transfer partners. The Starwood Preferred Guest program has over 30 airline transfer partners. When you consider that each one of these frequent flyer programs can have over a dozen redemption partners, the award travel possibilities are overwhelming.
Finally, booking an award flight can be extremely time consuming. I’ve been seriously collecting points and miles for more than 10 years, and have redeemed my miles for dozens of award flights for myself, my family, and my friends. I’ve also researched and written hundreds of articles on credit card rewards and award travel.
And yet when I have to book an award, I can spend hours searching various websites, piecing flights together, and calling the airlines to book them. If it takes someone like me that long to book an award flight, imagine what it’s…
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