My close friend from college (Chris) recently had to fly home to New York from San Francisco, but couldn't find a cheap return flight. To be specific, booking his return flight just 2-3 days beforehand from NYC to SFO was looking to be around $400 one way in economy—ouch. Luckily, he decided to chat with me, and this ended up becoming a great case study about points/miles, partner bookings, and Turkish Airlines (we'll get to that part soon).
The Background Context
My friend only has a few point earning credit cards: namely, the American Express® Gold Card. He didn't have an active or easy way to get Chase points. Consequently, when he texted me that he could only find a flight back using United miles, he thought it was game over for his wallet. While 15k UA points is certainly not bad for a $400 flight, my friend didn't have any way of getting Chase points, and so he thought he was doomed... or so he thought.
The cost to fly back to SF via United was only 15k miles, but my friend didn't have any Chase or United points
Consequently, the crux of the question is: is there a way for my friend to use his AMEX points to book this flight that is seemingly only bookable using United Airlines miles?
Star Alliance Partners And United Economy Seats
As many of you may know, United Airlines is a part of the "Star Alliance." Furthermore, many of you know that you can book United Airlines flights via Star Alliance partners. However, not all United Airlines flights can be booked via partners: only those in the "saver fare" bucket are released to partners.
In my friend's case, we can see that the best available flight so far on United economy is actually a Saver Award in fare class X. These seats should, in theory, become available on the other Star Alliance partner airlines. As such, being a curious (and good) friend, I delved into several Star Alliance carriers to see what I could find.
Air Canada Aeroplan
American Express transfers to Air Canada Aeroplan at a 1:1 ratio, meaning if we could find this flight on Aeroplan, then we could book this flight there. A quick search revealed some excellent options that further confirmed the UA X fare class theory:
This means my friend could book the same exact United Airlines flight using his Amex points by transferring them to Air Canada. At the time of this search, CA $47 was ~ USD $35, so not too terrible of a conversion vs UA's 15k miles required.
Avianca Airlines
American Express also transfers to Avianca Lifemiles at a 1:1 ratio, meaning if this flight was available as Economy X on UA and was bookable via Air Canada, it should therefore be bookable at all other Star Alliance partners:
Here, we can see that the cost of this flight for a point per point basis is actually cheaper than booking directly with United Airlines. That makes Lifemiles an extremely exciting prospect in this little points optimization game here.
Singapore Airlines
American Express further can transfer to Singapore Airlines KrisFlyer at a 1:1 ratio. While not known for their necessarily great partner redemptions, I was curious to see what their pricing looked like:
Again, we can see that the cost of this flight via Singapore for a point per point basis is actually cheaper than booking directly with United Airlines.
All Nippon Airways (ANA)
American Express is the exclusive transfer partner of ANA, transferring at a 1:1 ratio. Notably, ANA bookings can only be made via roundtrip bookings, so the use cases for my friend here were rather limited, unless he found a viable Economy X return on UA for some time later when he needed to fly home. Nevertheless, for the sake of completion, I was curious to see the pricing:
This comes out to about 15k miles + $5.6 USD per leg, which is the exact same as United's pricing. While this is cool since it doesn't require Chase points, given ANA's roundtrip requirements, this booking was not exactly super viable to proceed with.
Turkish Airlines (pre devaluation)
NOTE: American Express does not transfer to Turkish airlines; only Capital One, Citi, and Bilt do. However, Turkish has some very high value redemption sweet spots when prompted correctly, and I theorized this was no different. Since UA Economy X was appearing on the other major Star Alliance award search engines, shouldn't this one as well?
WOW—this crushes the competition pricing (please note: this will now cost 10k TK points after the devaluation, which is still awesome).
The Ranking
After going through all the Star Alliance options, I devised a table to view our options, and some clear winners emerge.
BRAND
Marketing Carrier
Operating Carrier
Total Cost
United Airlines
United Airlines
15,000 miles + $5.60
Air Canada Aeroplan
United Airlines
12,500 miles + $35
Avianca Lifemiles
United Airlines
13,500 miles + $5.60
Singapore Airlines
United Airlines
14,000 miles + $5.60
ANA (roundtrip)
United Airlines
15,000 miles + $5.60
Turkish Airlines
United Airlines
7,500 miles + $5.60
For someone who values points highly, I think the most obvious ranking by "cheapest to most expensive is as follows:"
Turkish > Avianca > Singapore > UA >= Air Canada
As such, I decided to figure out a way to help my friend book this flight using Turkish miles via his family friend with a Capital One card.
Booking Through Turkish Miles & Smiles: How To Make Me Frown
Unfortunately, while Turkish has the best deals, it also probably has one of the worst IT infrastructures out of all the airline programs. To put it simply, dealing with Turkish bookings is not for the faint of heart.
The first issue we ran into: new Turkish award accounts cannot book flights for friends/family. This is likely to prevent miles brokering, but is extremely annoying because it requires the doomsday motion: calling Turkish Airlines customer support.
We called them twice, only to find that the agents kept on blowing up their systems. Call agents said they "couldn't access something in their systems." Other agents told us to call back in about 20 minutes while their systems rebooted. One said "I'm experiencing something weird."
Turkish has such incredible pricing (well they used to, before the deval), but they have such poor IT that it is sometimes impossible to book these incredible offerings.
The Next Best Option: Avoiding IT Shenanigans
Alright, so Turkish was a bust. The next best option was Avianca, but they are also infamous for having horrid IT (in fact, my friend couldn't even pull up the itinerary I was finding on his end). Consequently, we decided to skip on saving 500 pts and just going to Singapore, which is known to be an infinitely better airline with much better customer support.
My friend made a KrisFlyer account, transferred his AMEX points, and successfully booked his flight back.
Moral Of The Story
So, what did we learn from this endeavor? A few important, fun things:
- Flights can be booked via their partners, not just directly with the airlines themselves
- Partner bookings are sometimes cheaper than booking directly with the airline
- Turkish IT is absolute trash
- Avianca IT is also, very trash
- Points/miles are very useful in a variety of scenarios, especially for close in bookings
This was a fun case study to write about and really demonstrates the power of points. To continue searching for trips using points, keep trying out Roame!
