My Beginner’s Guide to Travel Hacking Part 6: Redeeming Airline Miles

My Beginner’s Guide to Travel Hacking Part 6: Redeeming Airline Miles

Now you have learned how to accumulated points in Part 4 and Part 5, it’s now time for the fun part – Redeeming Points!

I had several strategies for figuring out the best points to use for redemption that I want to share with you starting with using Airline Miles.  

Figuring out the Best Airlines Miles to use for Redemption:

Use Award Hacker Website – This website is seriously amazing and so simple to use.  I needed a one way flight from Manila to Cape Town and wanted cash in on some of my points but wasn’t sure what to use.  I went to AwardHacker and enter in that information to see how many points I would need to use for a one way Economy ticket.  It shows me the lowest number of airlines miles is 37,500 on Singapore Airlines.  I didn’t have any Singapore Airlines miles but it shows you that there are 4 other programs that you can transfer miles from which is the MR, UR, TYP, and SPG boxes listed next to it.   

If you click the blue down arrow you can the see the details for those transfer Partners and there is the option to transfer from MR – Amex Membership Rewards, UR – Chase Ultimate Rewards, TYP – Citi ThankYou Points, and SPG – Starwood Preferred Guest.  

 At the time, I had about 90,000 Chase Ultimate Reward Points to use and I hadn’t yet accumulated any SPG or Citi points.  Since I had 90,000 Chase Ultimate Reward Points, I thought why not check out how many points it would take for me to fly business class since it will be a long flight?  So I went back to AwardHacker and changed the cabin type to Business.  Singapore Airlines still came back as the lowest amount of miles that I would need 55,000.   

I have never flown Business Class before and this seemed like the perfect opportunity.  I am so excited to finally fly Business Class for my long overnight but slightly scared that once I experience Business Class that I won’t ever want to go back to Economy for my long flights!  I looked up the ticket price and it would be $2200 if I would have paid out-of-pocket.  So this ended up giving me a redemption value of 4 cents per point or miles.  The Points Guy values Chase Ultimate Reward Points at 2.1 cents so I was getting an excellent value for my points.  Business Class tickets are one of the best uses of your points from what I have read.  Often times, Business Class tickets are so expensive that I wouldn’t be able to justify spending that amount of money on the airplane ticket and would rather use the extra money for extra comfort on my trip or fun excursions but giving 17,500 points more seems totally worth it.  To put it in perspective if I was making a purchase on Chase to use my points then I get 1.25 cents per point.  So it is like paying $218.75 to upgrade to Business.