All Nippon Airways (ANA), one of Japan's largest airline, operates a popular frequent flyer program among AMEX cardholders, known as ANA Mileage Club. With a strong presence in Asia and connections worldwide through the Star Alliance network, ANA offers many ways to earn and redeem miles. This guide will delve into how to earn ANA miles, highlight valuable redemption options, explain the program’s expiration policy, discuss how to earn elite status, and highlight the nuances of ANA's roundtrip award pricing.
How to Earn ANA Miles
How to Earn ANA Miles
Earning ANA miles is straightforward when flying on ANA metal, calculated as a function of the distance flown, fare class, and your membership status. You earn at different rates when considering domestic vs international ANA routes. Here’s the earning table for international ANA routes:
Flying On Airline Partners
ANA is a member of the Star Alliance, which means you can also earn miles when flying with any of the 26 Star Alliance member airlines, such as Lufthansa, United Airlines, and Singapore Airlines. Additionally, ANA has partnerships with other airlines such as Virgin Atlantic, allowing you to earn miles on these flights as well.
Mileage earning varies by the distance flown and fare class. It will vary from airline to airline, so the best way to figure out how many ANA points you’d earn on a segment is by looking at the partner earn charts.
Credit Card Transfer Partners
ANA is exclusive transfer partners with American Express (1:1), making it somewhat difficult to gain access to AMEX points unless you have an AMEX card.
Here are some of our favorite cards you can get to quickly get more ANA miles:
Do ANA Miles Expire?
In most cases, ANA miles expire 36 months after they are earned. There are no options to extend the validity of miles. It’s important to monitor your account to ensure you use your miles before they expire.
Mileage will not expire during the period in which an individual has ANA Diamond Service member status.
How To Earn ANA Elite Status (Premium Status)
To qualify for elite status, you need to earn Premium Points by flying on ANA, Star Alliance member airlines, or other partner airlines. Premium Points differ from regular miles and are accrued on a calendar year basis for the purpose of determining status.
Calculating Premium Points is a bit of a complicated formula. It starts off with the distance flown and the fare class, but also adds a “route ratio” and “boarding points” component.
To earn ANA status, you must earn the following Premium Points within the calendar year:
- Bronze: 30,000 Premium Points (with at least 15,000 points on ANA Group flights) or 300,000 yen spend on ANA Group flights.
- Platinum: 50,000 Premium Points (with at least 25,000 points on ANA Group flights) or 500,000 yen spend on ANA Group flights.
- Diamond: 100,000 Premium Points (with at least 50,000 points on ANA Group flights) or 1,000,000 yen spend on ANA Group flights.
Benefits of elite status include priority check-in and boarding, extra baggage allowance, lounge access, increased mileage earning, and more.
Who Are ANA’s Airline Partners?
As a part of the Star Alliance, ANA has a network of 26 airlines with reciprocal status recognition, mileage earning/redemptions, and more. If you have ANA status, you’ll receive some form of Star Alliance Silver/Gold status, which defines the types of benefits you get with the other Star Alliance carriers.
ANA also has other non-Star Alliance partners where you can earn miles on. Some of these airlines are also in other alliances, which makes them particularly interesting:
- Air Dolomiti
- Air Macau
- Etihad Airways
- Eurowings
- Garuda Indonesia
- Olympic Air
- Philippine Airlines
- Virgin Atlantic
- Vietnam Airlines
- Virgin Australia
How ANA Prices Its Award Flights
ANA uses a region-based award chart to price its award flights. The chart categorizes destinations into regions, and the mileage cost is determined by the origin and destination regions and the class of service. There are separate award charts for flights on ANA versus flights on partner airlines. Furthermore, seasonality is also factored, so some dates are more expensive to travel than others.
Notably: all ANA awards must be roundtrip bookings. There is no such thing as a one-way ANA award.
ANA doesn’t publish a singular simple table that covers all the combinations between these zones. However, we’ll cover the primary sweet spots so you don’t even need to take a second glance at the table.
For partner flights, ANA also uses a zone-based system to determine mileage costs.
ANA Sweet Spots 2024
If you know anything about the ANA frequent flyer program, you’ll know that it offers some incredible value for your miles, at the cost of the inconvenience/difficulty of finding roundtrip award flights. We’ll talk more about the quips of using ANA in another section.
Fly Roundtrip USA <> Japan On ANA Business Class For Just 105k ANA Miles
Despite ANA’s devaluation in 2024, you can still garner some incredible value out of your ANA miles by redeeming them directly for ANA’s business class. What’s particularly awesome is that Zone 6 (North America) is defined independent of your origin, so an ANA business class flight from New York costs the same as San Francisco.
Given that this flight can sometimes cost $5-10,000 roundtrip, talk about getting some crazy value out of your points!
Take USA <> Europe In Star Alliance Business Class For Just 100k ANA Miles Roundtrip
This is also an incredible redemption.
You can fly roundtrip business class on any Star Alliance carrier for just 100k ANA miles between the USA and Europe. For example, if you can find availability, you could do San Francisco to Istanbul on Turkish Airlines business class and then return to the US via Frankfurt to Newark on United Airlines Polaris business class for this incredible price.
While the example I gave above isn’t exactly “roundtrip,” ANA has a lot of quirks about its program that can present significant opportunity for those trying to extract as much value out of their miles as possible.
ANA Round The World: The Best Redemption In The Game?
ANA round the world is widely considered among the most incredible ways to use your points. Explaining all the ins and outs of this particular program would require a whole other article of its own! But to summarize, if you can find eligible flights, you could (in theory) fly in full Star Alliance/ANA business class for just ~115k ANA miles. Yes, you read that correctly—take a look at ANA’s published RTW award chart below:
There are quite a few rules to keep in mind:
- Flights must cross the Atlantic and Pacific ocean at least once
- Backtracking is not permitted
- The flight direction must go East to West or vice versa
- Up to 8 stopovers are permitted between the departure point and the final return point. (Up to 3 stopovers are permitted within Europe and up to 4 stopovers are permitted within Japan)
Different airlines will also pass on fuel surcharges; others will not. For example, SWISS is notorious for levying enormous fuel surcharges on ANA reservations, meaning you might be paying well over $1,000 out of pocket for just one leg in business class.
ANA Award Cancellation & Change Policy
ANA has an extremely generous award change policy: you can request free changes before the departure of your originally reserved flight and can change into a new flight departing at least 96 hours beforehand.
Their award refund policy is also rather generous: costing just 3,000 miles per customer.
Drawbacks Of Using ANA’s Loyalty Program
One of the main drawbacks of the ANA Mileage Club is the limited availability of award seats, especially in premium cabins like Business and First Class. Award seats can be particularly challenging to find, especially during peak travel seasons.
Additionally, requiring itineraries to be booked roundtrip is another huge limiting factor. For those of you in the points game, booking one way flights are far more preferred since you don’t need to have both award legs immediately available. Finding good roundtrip flights is typically extraordinarily difficult, which can make it super hard to book through ANA.
Conclusion
The ANA Mileage Club program is a versatile and valuable loyalty program with extensive earning and redemption opportunities. Whether you're a frequent traveler or an occasional flyer, understanding how to maximize your ANA miles can help you get the most value and enjoyment from your travel experiences with ANA and its partners. Arguably, ANA is among one of the most valuable programs out there, so I’d say it’s imperative to get a good understanding of how the program works.
