Episode 13: Finding the Worth of Your Airline Point Redemptions

As you heard in the last episode I discussed how to find award redemption rates on respective award sites with the airline sites themselves. In this episode, I am going to teach you guys how to figure out if whatever your redeeming is actually worth the value of using those points or maybe instead it might be more worth just purchasing the flight with dollars instead. 

How do we figure the award redemption value out? 

Well first off I'm going to show you guys just a quick example. One of them is a domestic flight within the United States from Dallas to Los Angeles on December 7th 2016. As  I'm doing this search online (through the British Airways Avios point search) for this date, you can see there's a bunch of awards in coach available. 

I'm going to pick one of these. I'm going to pick the 10 am flight there and see what awards. 10,000 Avios points plus $5. Sounds great right. Just 10,000 Avios points, but we have to do a quick search to see what the real prices are for this flight between Dallas and Los Angeles is, and there's many different ways to determine this.

You could go directly to the American Airlines website to do that direct search and I'm going to do that direct search right now from DFW to LAX on December's 7th and click search. And as you can see, a bunch of cheap flights ranging from $87 to $96. 

The flight that I chose was the 10:04AM flight that cost $96. To find out kind of the dollars to point value, you simply just take the price of the American Airlines flight and then divide it by the amount of points to redeem, which in this case was 10,000 Avios points. 

As you can see the calculation just barely comes out to one cent point. 

So that's not really a great redemption rate at all and not really saving much by using your Avios points here. Another quick way that you could do this search is just simply going on google.com/flights and doing a search between D.F.W. to L.A.X for December 7th and as you can see there's plenty of competition even with Spirit Airlines at $59 one way. So it's not really a great use of your airline points to redeem on these cheap, short domestic flights.

Again with the generalizations usually using your points for business or first class or flying international would be a better point usage. 

So I'm going to go back and change this search from a domestic flight to a international flight. I will just leave Dallas there actually and do Tokyo December 7th and see if there's any availability there. No I don't want to break up the journey. So there is D.F.W. to Tokyo Narita nonstop with Japan Airlines. Let's actually click on this. So 30,000 Avios points for economy and then premium economy is 60,000 Avios points. 

Let's actually go straight to the Japan Airlines website and price this out. I go to Japan Airlines website and quickly choose the starting and ending point cities with the date of December 7th. As you can see searching for flights may take some time to load on other airline booking websites. 

The results loaded yielding some economy special one way. Let's see if we can find that direct flight though. I see the direct flights are at the bottom. Just quickly look at the time, 11:15 A.M. So this flight retails for that day at $1,373.10 one way in economy for that flight and then if we booked it in economy with points again it is 30,000 Avios points.

If I do my quick calculations here with $1,373.10 divided by 30,000 Avios points = around 4.5 cents per point. 

So this here is way more of a worthwhile redemption than redeeming it on a domestic U.S. flight. 

Let's actually see what the premium economy for Japan Airlines would cost you about $400 more. That would be $1,780 for retail flight price and vs. redeeming that flight using 60,000 Avios points. Let's now see how the point to dollar ratio increases or decreases. 

I am going to put this into my calculator . $1,780 divided by 60,000 points comes out to 2.8 cents per point, so close to 3 cents per point. The redemption value went down compared to redeeming with economy flight. 

Which one would you choose? 

Well if you care for comfort, then perhaps premium economy but like I said the redemption value went down versus redeeming it on coach which was more valuable at 4.5 cents per point. In this decision I would definitely pick this one way flight direct with Japan Airlines from D.F.W. to Tokyo over a domestic US flight, which is just way better just to buy the flight with dollars instead of using points.

Hopefully this helps you kind of determine and price out the value of your flights for the points that you're going to use. 

You definitely want to do this because you don't want to waste your points on flights that you could simply buy. Basically search on the back end for the points value and then search directly on the airline website to get the dollar value and then simply take the dollar divided by points and then you get the dollar to points kind of ratio. 

I hope this helps you find valuable flights out there. 

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What was the best cent/point redemption value you ever got?

Just comment and let me know if you guys have any questions that you want me to address. 

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If you missed, Episode 12: Redeeming Your Airline Points for Cheap or First Class Travel

Next, Episode 14: Figuring Out Which Plane You Will Fly In

Follow me @hustletoparadise to stay up to date on future episodes of Travel Hacking with Hustle to Paradise.

(Introduction photo courtesy of Kychan found on Unsplash)