Questions and Answers

Hi Lucky,

I have read many of your blogs and trip reports. Many of them refer to you redeeming miles to buy flight tickets in business and first classes. You generally seen to redeem miles in the range of 60k to 150K to book your premium class tickets. I was recently trying to redeem my emirates skyward miles for a business class ticket to Seattle from Bangalore and it required more than 213,784 miles and almost 1000 $ cash for return in business class. I just searched for a particular date and clicked the option to pay using miles. is there some other way this needs to be done?

[USER=1799]@saikat das[/USER], welcome. Unfortunately not all miles and redemption policies are created equal. If you look at the type of miles bring redeemed when Ben was traveling on EK you’ll see that he was using Alaska miles. As you can see, Skywards miles are significantly more expensive. There may be some routes where Skywards costs are more reasonable but since they pass on fuel surcharges you’re likely to have large out of pocket expenses.

Hi [USER=1799]@saikat das[/USER]! The best option for redeeming emirates miles (if you already have them), is to purchase a slightly more expensive base fare, and then upgrade. Just avoid the cheapest tickets, as those can’t be upgraded until 24 hours before departure, but in general this will get you a better value than pure redemptions with Skywards miles.

Good luck!

Thanks [USER=79]@Gaurav[/USER] and [USER=7]@Tiffany[/USER]. Would like to understand if there is some fundamental difference in the way miles from different airlines are valued or is it that some airlines are more generous. Does it have to do anything that the recvenue fares itself vary a lot. for example just read that Ben booked a round trip in business from canada-UK-South Africa cost just about 2250 USD whereas one from BLR-SEA-BLR is more than 5300USD.

Every airline has their own loyalty program with it’s own rules. How you earn and how much you earn are different between different airlines. Fares are also based on demand rather than distance, before taking into account any fare sales.

Before you credit miles from a flight, it might help to check out where if crediting to another program could be more useful

[USER=1799]@saikat das[/USER] JAL and Alaska Airlines are partners of Emirates and you can credit miles to their programs. Earning rates and rules can be found here:

JAL – [URL]http://www.jal.co.jp/en/jmb/earn/travel/flight/ek.html[/URL]
AS – [URL]https://www.alaskaair.com/content/mileage-plan/partners/emirates.aspx[/URL]

Note that for JAL, there is a ton of fare classes for tickets between Dubai and Japan that earn zero miles. Not sure why. For Alaska, EK redemption rates are MUCH higher now. However, you still may find either program better than Emirates’ own program, depending on where you are based, where you fly to most, and where you would like to use the miles.