With American’s move to revenue based earning, the three legacy US carriers all award miles based on your fare, not miles flown anymore. So, where should you credit your miles and points for miles flown?
Enter a great new tool – Where to Credit
I learned about this awesome tool from Jonathan Khoo yesterday via twitter. Where to Credit asks two questions: What are you flying, and what booking class is your ticket booked in? In fact, you don’t even need to populate the booking class, but you should. Why? Because airlines are increasingly awarding fewer miles for some heavily discounted fares.
For example, check out what Where to Credit says about this flight on United to Australia. First enter in the details:
Where to Credit a United “G” Fare.
Next you get the results — they’re a bunch in this case:
Where to Credit a United “G” fare – part 1
And
Where to Credit a United “G” fare – part 2
If you don’t want to scroll through the whole list, you can also sort by Rate, which would put Singapore Airlines’ KrisFlyer program up at the top:
Best Frequent Flyer Program to credit a United “G” Fare – courtesy of: Where to Credit
Wrapping Up – Where you should credit your miles may vary
While more miles are being accrued from credit card sign-up bonuses and credit card spend, rather than flying, its still good to get the most when you do fly. Where to Credit can help you do that. Of course the caveat is that if you are flying on an expensive ticket, and/or have status on the airline, you may need to do your own calculation, as it doesn’t look like Where to Credit incorporates status bonuses.
Have you ever wondered where you should credit your miles? Have you credited flights to a different program to earn more miles?
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This is interesting. Our airline of choice is SQ so in general we have done our paid flights on Star Alliance carriers and tried to put the miles all on SQ. A couple of times we wound up getting little or no mileage as we never thought to check the rules or even the fare class. Where do you see what exact booking class you have?
My problem is that I prefer to have all or most of my miles on one carrier, rather than have small amounts that I have to waste on merchandise or gift cards.
Since nearly all of our flights are international, I don’t think I need a lot of miles on US based carriers since we can use SQ or CX to Asia and Lufthansa to Europe.
Thanks for this post as I may be able to get a better value for miles flown, but only if I have a way of using these miles for awards.
@Ira – You should be able to find the booking class on your receipt. Each airline seems to show it differently so far as I can tell, but if you search on ITA, it will show you the booking class like this: “Economy (G)”
Consolidating your miles on one carrier does make sense – e.g. SQ, however, if you fly enough that you might generate reasonable amounts in multiple accounts, that can help. Further, if you incorporate transferable points currencies like Ultimate Rewards, Membership Rewards, Thank You Points, or SPG Points, getting the most miles for each flight could become a more meaningful goal, because you could top up those accounts with transferable points.
Learned about and began using this site back in April. What a great tool.
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Wheretocredit has been around since March 2015. Great tool though! http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/travel-tools/1661462-introducing-wheretocredit-com.html
@Tonei – I didn’t realize it was around that long, but its amazing how you can still learn new things each day! So much cool stuff out there.
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