Travel rewards 101: #10 How to Book Flights with Transferable Points

In the previous post, we reviewed how airline alliances can open up the possibility of booking flights with a program that is not the same as the airline operating the flight. The end of that post showed that we can potentially book a Delta flight from Boston to Edinburgh not only with Delta’s own Sky Miles program but also Air France / KLM Flying Blue and Virgin Atlantic Flying Club. Let’s walk through this example to understand how to book this flight using transferable points. We’ll use this to walk through the general steps to take in booking a flight with transferable points.

Scenario: Spring trip to Edinburgh in 2025

Let’s say in this scenario that I want to visit Edinburgh, Scotland in May 2025. I have approximately 100,000 American Express Membership Rewards in my account after signing up for an American Express Gold card and completing the minimum spend requirement to get 90,000 Membership Rewards points. Here’s how I would go about booking this flight using my American Express points.

Step 1: Sign Up for Loyalty Account

If you have not done so already, sign up for a loyalty account with all programs you’re interested in. I would recommend signing up for a loyalty account with all programs that are available to you as part of any bank currency you have. For example, if you’ve started to collect American Express Membership Rewards, I would sign up for a loyalty account with all of the programs that American Express partners with.

Step 2: Search for Award Availability

For the purposes of this post, we won’t dive into specifics about how to search for award availability, which deserves a lot of discussion on its own. Do know that it’s typically going to be a good bit more work to search for flight award availability, especially if you are looking into partner award programs, which you certainly should be doing to take advantage of your points and miles. To give a very basic example, I can click “Book with Miles” on Air France’s website, look for a one way flight from Boston to Edinburgh in May 2025, and see what availability Air France has to book the flight with miles.

Searching for Award Availability on Air France

If the program has the opportunity to search dates flexibly, I typically like to do that: some programs have flexible date searches where you can typically search for up to a week’s worth of award availability at a time. Other programs have full “calendar” availability that will show a full month’s worth of award availability, which is ideal.

Air France shows 7 days worth of availability at a time

It’s worth checking with other programs as well. In our case here, I found that Virgin Atlantic Flying Club has access to this flight as well.

Step 3: Compare Points Costs against Cash Value

When deciding to redeem transferable points, we should always keep the cash value of the flights we’re looking to book in mind: not all award tickets are actually a good value for our points and miles. If we’re spending more in points than the flight is worth in cash so that our points are not very valuable, it may be better to use cash for the flight rather than spend our hard-earned points on a sub-optimal redemption. This is a somewhat difficult case, because we’re considering one-way international flights. One-way international flights tend to be priced at significantly more than half the round trip cost. We can see this when looking at this flight one-way on Delta compared to an example round trip booking if we were to stay in Edinburgh for a week.

Delta shows this flight for $739 one way

In this case, it’s typically a good idea to compare our points costs against half of the round trip flight: we probably wouldn’t book a one way cash flight for $749 compared to a round trip ticket for $1,244 in this case. That means we should compare our points costs against a $622 cash cost for the ticket ($1,244 / 2).

We should compare all three of our booking options to this $622 cash cost.

Option 1: Use 85,000 Delta Sky Miles (assuming I have a Delta credit card) + $5.60 in fees

Option 2: Use 20,500 Air France / KLM Flying Blue miles + $123 in fees

Option 3: Use 10,000 Virgin Atlantic Flying Club miles + $202 in fees

We should also consider transfer ratios and transfer bonuses when working out the value of each of these options.

The transfer ratio describes how many points you have to transfer out in order to earn those points in the airline or hotel of your choice. For the most part, this is 1:1, meaning 1,000 Membership Rewards points will be worth 1,000 Delta Sky Miles or 1,000 Flying Blue miles or 1,000 Virgin Atlantic Flying Club miles. This is not always the case, though.

Transfer bonuses may or may not be available to us at any given time. American Express and other transferable points programs often run transfer bonuses where you can get a better transfer ratio of our points to specific programs. For example, American Express is currently running a deal (as of August 2024) where transferring to any of the Avios programs–Aer Lingus, British Airways, or Iberia–carries a 30% bonus, so 1,000 Membership Rewards points would be worth 1,300 Avios. This doesn’t apply to our specific scenario here, but this is something to keep in mind when comparing the value of the three options.

Amex is currently offering a transfer bonus to Avios programs

Returning to our three options above, we get the following values:

Option 1 Delta: Transferring 85,000 Membership Rewards would allow us to book this flight with Delta, saving us $617 ($622 cash cost – $5 in fees). That means our 85,000 Membership Rewards are getting us 0.73 CPP. This is not a good value, and is just barely above the value that American Express would give us for cashing out the points. This is not a good option.

Option 2 Air France: Transferring 21,000 Membership Rewards (transfers have to be in increments of 1,000 points) would allow us to book this flight with Flying Blue, saving us $499 ($622 cash cost – $123 in fees). This is a much higher value for our points! These 21,000 points are now saving us $499, which means we are getting 2.4CPP value for our points. This is fantastic!

Option 3 Virgin Atlantic: Transferring 10,000 Membership Rewards would allow us to book this flight with Virgin Atlantic, saving us $420 ($622 cash cost – $202 in fees). This is the highest value for our points! These 10,000 points are now saving us $420, which means we are getting 4.2CPP value for our points. This is phenomenal!

On Taxes and Fees:

Now, you’ve probably noticed that the Flying Blue and Virgin Atlantic options have higher taxes and fees than Delta’s option does. This is true: often, when you book international flights with a partner, there are some taxes and fees that still need to be paid to book the award. Virgin Atlantic’s option is actually requiring that we pay the most cash. The whole point of this points and miles game is to reduce our cash costs, right? So, should I actually be avoiding the Virgin Atlantic option because of the higher cash cost? I would say NO: I would rule out the Delta option, because it’s such a worse value for points. Then, I would compare the Air France option against the Virgin Atlantic option. I would have to transfer an extra 11,000 points to Air France to book this flight, and it would save me $79. This means these points are only worth 0.71CPP in this case, which is not a great value. I think I can get better value holding onto these points for another trip in the future. In this case, I’m okay with a slightly higher cash cost, because my points are getting me such a good value here.

Step 4: Transfer Points and Book!

Before you transfer your points officially, always be sure to check that the award is still available and that the cancellation policy works with your plans: the cancellation policies of flights booked with miles vary greatly among different programs. Typically, US programs tend to be the most friendly, while some international programs will levy cancellation or change fees if you do ever need to change your flights. In this case, I would go ahead and transfer those 10,000 points to Virgin Atlantic to book this flight. Practically speaking, I would also want to know if there were any good uses of points for the flight back as well, but for the purposes of this scenario, we’ll only consider this one-way flight. Speaking of one-way flights, there is rarely any value to booking round trip award flights. Award prices are typically priced by flight or segment (one leg of a multi-leg flight) and there is typically not a discount or good reason to book round trip flights. In fact, it often restricts you to look for round trip flights if one airline has availability in one direction and another does in the reverse direction.

With that accomplished, congratulations, we have found a way to use our transferable points to get great value on an international flight. This example once again underscores the value of transferable points: if I only held Delta Sky Miles because I assumed I could only use Sky Miles to book this Delta flight, I couldn’t have considered the Air France or Virgin Atlantic options, which both ended up being a significantly better value, and my points were worth much more than 2 CPP.

Now that we’ve walked through this example, I’ll walk through an overview of how to book premium cabin flights, which often represent the highest value and luxury we can achieve with points and miles, in the next post.