Transparency is very important for members of frequent flyer programs.

It should be easy to find out how many points or miles you need for a particular reward. You should also be able to easily find out how much you’ll need to pay in taxes & charges when booking reward flights. And you deserve to know that this pricing won’t change tomorrow (or that you’ll at least be notified before it does).

Transparency in frequent flyer programs gives members the confidence to accumulate points, knowing roughly how they will be able to use them and what they are worth. It also makes it much easier to compare frequent flyer programs and to hold airlines to account… which is perhaps why some airlines make it rather difficult to find this information!

So, which frequent flyer programs have the most transparent reward flight pricing? One left-field way that we can measure this is the amount of time it takes to find it…

Comparison of time taken to find reward flight costs

We recently analysed the ease of finding the cost of a reward flight booking – in terms of both the points and the taxes & fees required – in a wide range of different frequent flyer programs. To do this, we timed how long it took us to find the cost of a simple one-way Economy Class reward flight from New York to London.

For the purposes of this investigation, I started by going to the home page of each airline’s website. I then timed how long it took for me to search for a reward flight that I knew was available, and to see the full cost of the flight. A colleague then searched as well, and we recorded the average of the two times. We were both using a stable, high-speed internet connection.

It’s not a totally scientific study. Nonetheless, the findings are quite interesting.

Here are the results (you can click on the chart to view a larger version):

As you can see, it took much longer to find reward flight costs with Malaysia Airlines Enrich and Thai Royal Orchid Plus, compared to all the other programs we checked. This is because it was not possible to find the information online, and we therefore needed to call these airlines.

If we remove Malaysia Airlines and Thai Airways from the chart, it makes it a bit easier to read the remaining values:

Why does it take longer to find reward pricing with some airlines than others?

On some airline websites, we simply needed to search on the home page, tick the “use points” box, and the available flights – including the cost – appeared straight away. Airline websites in this category include Qantas, Virgin Australia, United, American Airlines, Delta, Air Canada and Alaska Airlines.

Some airlines require users to log in before their website will display available flights. This adds to the amount of time required to check the cost of a reward flight, but only by a minute or so. (For the purposes of this experiment, we’ve assumed people are already members of the program.) Websites in this category belong to airlines including British Airways, Avianca, Singapore Airlines, Cathay Pacific and South African Airways.

With Air France/KLM Flying Blue, which Point.me recently ranked the world’s best frequent flyer program, the search took a bit longer because the Air France and KLM websites were slow and glitchy. On other websites, it took a while to actually navigate to the page where you can search for reward flights.

Phone calls required: Malaysia Airlines, Thai Airways and Air New Zealand

It took us a particularly long time to find out how much the taxes would be when redeeming Malaysia Airlines Enrich miles or Thai Royal Orchid Plus miles for partner award flights on the New York-London route.

Malaysia Airlines does not seem to show any partner airline awards on its website, so I had no choice but to call. On my first call, the operator couldn’t hear me so hung up on me. On my second attempt, the call dropped out after the operator took my details and put me on hold. Finally, on the third call, I was able to get an answer – but only after waiting for a while on hold. The whole process took 45 minutes!

Thai Airways does show some Star Alliance partner awards on its website, but only for itineraries originating in Bangkok. Since the flight I was looking for departed from the United States, I had to call up. My call had to be transferred multiple times before I got put through to someone who eventually was able to give me a booking quote.

Finally, a note on Air New Zealand Airpoints. We were able to find the cost of a reward flight from New York to London on the New Zealand version of the Air NZ website. However, if you had an Australian-based Airpoints account, you might need to call Air New Zealand to get a quote. This would obviously take longer than the time shown in this article.

A few other notes

There are a few more things we should probably mention at this point…

Most airlines don’t show reward seats for all partners online

We deliberately chose the New York-London route because it’s served by a lot of airlines, including carriers in each of the major alliances. All of the programs we checked, except Thai and Malaysia Airlines which show almost no partner airline awards on their websites, have partner airlines flying this route that you can book online.

But most frequent flyer programs offer rewards on more partner airlines than they show on their websites. So, for award bookings on other routes and airlines, you might still need to call your frequent flyer program.

For example, you have to call the Velocity Membership Contact Centre to redeem Velocity points on Virgin Atlantic, South African Airways or Hawaiian Airlines.

The Qantas website’s multi-city booking tool

The Qantas website helpfully displays the amount of Qantas points, as well as fees & taxes, you would need to pay when searching for a one-way or return Classic Reward flight. You don’t need to log into your Qantas Frequent Flyer account to see this information.

However, you would need to log in to search for Classic Reward flights using the multi-city booking tool. When making a multi-city booking, such as a Oneworld Classic Flight Reward, the Qantas website also deliberately hides the amount of taxes & carrier charges payable unless you have enough points already in your account to make that booking.

The Qatar Airways website

The Qatar Airways website also hides the amount of taxes & charges payable for redemptions on Qatar Airways metal, unless you already have enough Avios in your account to complete the booking.

The United Airlines website

In general, the United Airlines website is very easy to use. However, it often stops working after you make just a handful of searches. This seems to be an intentional feature of United’s website which is designed to stop bots.

Velocity reward seat availability on United

On the date that we searched, United had six flights from Newark to London with plenty of Economy reward seats available. None of these seats were available to book on the Virgin Australia website using Velocity points.

Instead, Virgin Australia’s website exclusively showed connecting itineraries for booking with Velocity points. For example, you could book from Newark to London via Washington, or from Boston to London via Newark – just nothing non-stop.

This wasn’t a one-off glitch. The same thing happened when we searched for Velocity available on many other United Airlines routes and dates.

I can’t say for sure if United or Velocity is responsible for this glitch. But Velocity Frequent Flyer was the only United partner program we found that had this issue.

How much does each program charge for a New York-London reward flight?

The main purpose of this article is to compare the amount of time it takes to find the cost of reward flights with different frequent flyer programs. This is one way that we can measure the program’s level of reward pricing transparency.

But we thought you might also be interested to know how much each loyalty program is charging for the same one-way Economy reward ticket from New York to London. The table below compares the amounts of points and charges payable with each program:

The frequent flyer programs with the lowest and highest reward flight costs

As you can see, Virgin Atlantic Flying Club charges the lowest amount of points. And the following programs have the lowest fees & taxes:

• United MileagePlus
• American Airlines AAdvantage
• Delta SkyMiles
• Air New Zealand Airpoints
• South African Airways Voyager

That said, South African Airways Voyager charges by far the highest amount of miles for this redemption. 128,800 miles is not an error – it’s the amount shown on the program’s Star Alliance award chart!

Qantas Frequent Flyer, Emirates and Thai Airways levy particularly high carrier charges when redeeming points or miles on this route.

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:

Matt Graham

The editor of Australian Frequent Flyer, Matt's passion for travel has taken him to over 90 countries… with the help of frequent flyer points, of course!
Matt's favourite destinations (so far) are Germany, Brazil & Kazakhstan. His interests include economics, aviation & foreign languages, and he has a soft spot for good food and red wine.

You can connect with Matt by posting on the Australian Frequent Flyer community forum and tagging @AFF Editor.