Article: Which Airlines Make It Easiest to Find Reward Flight Costs?

[AFF Editor]

Which Airlines Make It Easiest to Find Reward Flight Costs? is an article written by the AFF editorial team:

Which Airlines Make It Easiest to Find Reward Flight Costs?

As a way of comparing transparency in frequent flyer programs, we measured the time it takes to find reward flight costs with different airlines.

www.australianfrequentflyer.com.au

You can leave a comment or discuss this topic below.

 

[SydneySwan]

Another victory for AJ - Qantas has the highest taxes on Matt's table on the NY to London route. Quelle surprise!

 

[Mwenenzi]

Another victory for AJ - Qantas has the highest taxes on Matt's table on the NY to London route. Quelle surprise!

Real taxes are the same for all airlines on the same route/class of travel.
A change from a non revenue flight to a revenue flight (=co-payment - surcharge) can trigger additional real taxes. Tend to be low (single - double digit)
The AU$8 is the US$5.60 Passenger Civil Aviation Security Charge to the US Transport Security Administration.

While many credit cards transfer to ffp's at the same rate, how many low and mid range cost/fare bucket flights needed (on the same route) to earn ff miles/points/avios for that economy award would be interesting (with no status). Maybe a harder calculation with revenue based ffp

Of interest.

Although it’s not part of this analysis, I was also quite surprised to see the Emirates Skywards co-payment when redeeming miles for United Business Class from New York to London. Most other programs don’t impose any carrier charges on United Airlines redemptions, so AUD1,252 is a shockingly high amount:

 

[Lynda2475]

IME for CR choosing AA to fly US-LHR always costs more in fees than choosing BA for same route.

 

[Gold Member]

That’s an interesting approach, but honestly, I don’t think most people care much if it takes them 24 seconds or 51 seconds to find the Reward Flight Charges. Considering how long it takes to actually find an award you want (sometimes hours/days), I don’t really see the point of the article other than to have some fun, or perhaps for “other” reasons. I know it’s been labelled as a “left-field” way to compare transparency so I’ll take it with a large grain of salt.

But if we are really going to compare transparency and trust, how about measuring the time taken trying to determine the booking class and cross reference that with the “Simpler & Fairer” earn tables, as an example? That should be a simple exercise, and one which demonstrates the Airline’s transparency and trustworthiness, or lack thereof. But Qantas is not alone in these shenanigans; all the Airlines successfully play these games with their members in different ways to drive their profit margins. Some are better at it than others, and some have mastered the art.

For award bookings, what most people really want to know is:

- are there any rewards available in premium cabins for long haul travel on the dates I want
- how many points are required, and
- how much are the taxes and Carrier Charges.

The article briefly touches on the latter but it’s lost in the article’s overarching message.

A picture says a thousand words and what better way than a chart. Personally, I’d love to see AFF publish Airline FFP charts with a comparison of like for like Carrier Charges/Surcharges for a variety of different routes. We all know what these are - they’re the grossly excessive extra fees and charges that many Airlines add to the total, simply because they can. They often try to hide them for good reason, and they would like you to believe they are simply passing these on to you because that’s what they incurred and therefore have no choice - not true.

 

[WilsonM]

That’s an interesting approach, but honestly, I don’t think most people care much if it takes them 24 seconds or 51 seconds to find the Reward Flight Charges. Considering how long it takes to actually find an award you want (sometimes hours/days), I don’t really see the point of the article other than to have some fun, or perhaps for “other” reasons. I know it’s been labelled as a “left-field” way to compare transparency so I’ll take it with a large grain of salt.

To take this point - if you have to search a lot for the award you want, it matters a great deal if it takes 24 versus 51 seconds to see the costs (or effectively, that there are award seats there, which this effectively is), as the time spent would add up extremely quickly.

I'd much rather spend 2 hours searching for an award versus 4, etc etc - it seems pretty useful to me to know that I'm going to be in for a long one if I'm trying to find awards on Flying Blue vs if I'm searching on Virgin Atlantic.

 

[Gold Member]

To take this point - if you have to search a lot for the award you want, it matters a great deal if it takes 24 versus 51 seconds to see the costs (or effectively, that there are award seats there, which this effectively is), as the time spent would add up extremely quickly.

I'd much rather spend 2 hours searching for an award versus 4, etc etc - it seems pretty useful to me to know that I'm going to be in for a long one if I'm trying to find awards on Flying Blue vs if I'm searching on Virgin Atlantic.

Agreed. But this article is all about the time taken to determine the costs. If it was about how long it takes to see award search results we’d have a different table and chart.

Depending on the airline award tool, once you’re in the award search engine having entered the parameters, you can usually traverse back and forth a day or week, and sometimes even see results on a monthly basis. That’s not 24 or 51 seconds, it’s an additional 1-5 seconds per search. Sometimes there are ways around it via other airline searches engines, via paid subscription tools etc. These methods can further reduce the time taken again (quicker than 1-5 seconds). But extrapolating the once off and initial search term entry on the award search tool and suggesting that it’s a comparison of either 2 or 4 hours is not accurate.

When determining whether to acquire points in a given Airline FFP for the first time or ongoing, we don’t exactly investigate the time required for each individual day award search. I doubt any of us would use that factor as a key input to determine whether we should acquire those points or not. Most of us would use the other three factors I mentioned up thread.