Your Ultimate Guide to Airline Miles and Points

Learn how to maximize airline miles with credit cards. Discover the benefits of points and miles programs for savvy travelers.

So what exactly are points and miles? To put it simply, it’s what you get when you pay for things using your credit cards. Somewhat like a rewards program to reward people for their loyalty. Points and Miles can also be earned through car rentals, hotels, shopping portals and flights. While “miles” are usually referred to what is earned through airline loyalty program. Of course some airlines had to call their miles points while others make their own lingo for them like “Avios”. I’m looking at you British Airways and Aer Lingus. I digress. In short, its what you get for being loyal to a certain business in the hopes you spend more with them.

While you’ve probably seen people talking about how they only paid a couple dollars for a first or business class flight. They probably paid for it with points and miles. The main ways of getting those points and miles is by being loyal to that airline and spending all your money with them or transferring your points over to them or their partners to book a flight. I probably just said i bunch of mombo jubmbo so i’ll break it down.

There are currently 6 credit card issuers you should familiarize yourself with, and they are:

• American Express

• Bilt

• Capital One

• Chase

• Citi

• Wells Fargo (They Just came out with a card so worth mentioning)

These are the 5 issuers that will let you transfer their points to their transfer partners that will allow you to book those flights.

In regards to flights. We kind of screwed ourselves over. If you’ve ever tried to book a flight with points through Delta or another US Airline you’ve probably seen some ungodly amount of miles needed for a one way ticket. Thats because everyone has Delta miles and over times the number of miles needed to redeem them has gone up. While that may be true, the rest of the world does not have credit cards and points easily accessible to them. Thats where travel partners come in. A lot of the airlines are part of one of these three Alliances:

• One World

• Sky Team

• Star Alliance

To try and keep it straight forward. You might have to transfer your points from your credit card to a partnered airline to book the flight you might want. Here is where the actual work comes in.

While some portals are terrible for find availability (Turkish airlines), they might have great redemptions like booking a United flight from California to Hawaii in economy for 10K. Other portals with great user interfaces like United will have that same flight for 25K or more.

But Luis, how will I know what booking portals to look up flights on?

Well keep reading my blog posts and I’ll teach you.

What about all those booking alliances and airlines? I’ll never remember those

Well that easy, because I like you I made you a sheet with all the alliance airlines.