For when you don’t know what miles to use

We’ve all had times, as travel rewards users, when we don’t know which miles to use between two destinations, and don’t want to have to slog through each airline program’s award charts to figure it out. For instance, my buddy who is a doctor and who has accumulated miles in several different programs asked me which miles he should use for a January roundtrip from San Francisco to Honolulu. My hunch was that it would be using British Airways miles on a Oneworld carrier, but I wasn’t sure. I knew just from experience that LAX – HNL is 12.5k Avios oneway, but I wasn’t sure if SFO was the same.

It was then that I remembered a website I’d heard about several months earlier, and had meant to write about, but then totally forgotten in the midst of studying for board exams. It’s called Awardace, and it compares many different loyalty program award costs between airports. I went there, typed in SFO – HNL, and this page came up:

This is awesome! In addition to the award costs for the major US carriers, it also shows Aeroplan, ANA, BA, Lifemiles, Lufthansa, and a bunch more! Although I pride myself in being pretty savvy when it comes to redeeming miles, I was incorrect on the SFO – HNL mileage. It is actually 17k miles oneway, so 34k roundtrip for my friend. We both looked and couldn’t find any availability through the BA or Qantas site, so he decided to use AA miles to book an Alaska flight roundtrip.

I’m definitely using this website more often in the future!