Award Charts and Route Maps

Dear Annabelle,

I wish there was some easy to use search that just linked all this frequent flyer points stuff up.  You would type in where you wanted to go and it would tell you which programs actually had flights on that route and how many points it would cost.  That way you could decide ahead of time which miles programs were best for the travel you wanted to do.  And once you had miles you could decide which program to use for a given trip.  But alas it just doesn't exist yet (we have been discussing what would be involved in actually programming it!).

You have route maps and Google Flights or Kayak to tell you whether an airline and its partners actually fly a given route.  But that means you need to have the details of the partner airlines.  Then you have the award charts for all those different frequent flyer programs.  Then the overlay of the credit card points and which ones best match with the reward flights.  For example, if I want to fly a family of 4 to Dublin from Denver what is the best frequent flyer program to use (ideally with no fuel surcharges) and the best credit card to get to help amass said points?  I wish this could be answered easily online.

Here and here are summaries of some of the route maps and award charts.

These charts really speak to the complexity of this issue.  The fact that the same frequent flyer programs can go to so many different airlines and that in some cases redeeming with one plan is different than redeeming with another as far as the points required for the same routing.

This site, Milez.biz, is trying to do this kind of search but it falls short in lots of ways.  First, it is awkward to do comparisons in the long list format that comes out of the search.  A summary table that let you actually compare the programs by cabin would be much more helpful.  Second, you have no way of knowing if your actual itinerary can be booked with each specific program.  For example, a Denver to Ottawa search indicates that the Turkish Smiles and Miles is only program needing 20K rather than the standard 25K points for economy RT.  Well from what I can tell even if you acquired these miles I don't think they let you book a ticket from Denver to Ottawa, even though the standard award chart of North America to North America destination does say 20K.  Andrew says that this piece would be really hard to automate because the data on where each airline flies is proprietary and repeatedly searching the airline websites will get you banned.

I think I am going to do some "case studies" to try and walk through this information for the flights I am the most interested in.

Hugs,
Jen