Many major airlines offer a points or miles buying facility, with some, most notably American Airlines and Alaska Airlines often having point sales and bonus offers. These can be exceptional value, giving you the opportunity to buy points at heavily discounted rates to then use in the future.
When buying points from a partner, they can be used to book flights on your native airline. eg: If you buy Virgin America Elevate points, they can be used to redeem Virgin Australia flights. Purchased American Airlines miles can be used for Qantas flights.
Buying points does move away from the whole notion of ‘free flights’ from points earn, but it does enable you to top up your balance if you’re just shy of what you need. Often if there’s a points sale on, it can enable Business Class flights for around half retail price.
There are a few hoops to jump through, and can get quite complex. A great place to keep reading is Keith’s guide to the basics of buying airline and hotel points as well as how to buy points for cheap domestic Business Class flights.
Earning Points: First Principles
- Getting Started with Frequent Flyer programs
- Earning by Flying
- Buying points and miles
- Earning from Credit Cards
- Earning from Offers & Partners
- Ask Questions & Keep in the Loop
- Earning and Using Points – First Principles
Using Points: First Principles
- Who, What, When, Where and How?
- Planning
- Flexibility
- Tools
- Flexible Points Programs
- Maximising Points value
- Qantas and Virgin Australia Key Partners
- Searching for points seats
@Samantha
Each to their own, but Point Hacks is clearly a very different beast to FlyerTalk and the only Australian-based resource of it’s kind (AFF is basically a blog-based QF fan club and AusBT addresses the “business traveller”).
Good luck sifting through all of those posts on FlyerTalk to extrapolate the basic principles of frequent traveller wisdom of relevance to an Australian based traveller unless you an advanced player!
Of course, if you are clued up, why bother reading introductory articles, which are obviously there to help newbies…just bypass and go to the content of interest…
Why shouldn’t the Point Hacks team attempt to help beginners by highlighting the basic principles?
A couple of years ago I spent two weeks full time between contracts reading FlyerTalk and various overseas-based frequent flyer sites just to get my head around the basics outside of the QF / VA systems. When I first realised that you could buy points cheaply from other airlines and hotel schemes it was a revelation!
IMHO experience Point Hacks deserves our support. The reviews aren’t based on airline supplied press freebies like AusBT, it’s not as overtly QF fan club as AFF, it has an Australian perspective unlike most other internet travel resources and it has an emphasis on articles rather than being just another blog…
That said, yes, I agree that the Amex buy points option should be on the “need-to-know” list – and, yes, indeed, I think I picked that up from browsing an unrelated FlyerTalk post: it’s certainly not advertised accessibly by Amex and now that the AUD has dived against the USD it is the ofter roughly the same price to buy Amex points as those of overseas airlines such as American, Alaskan, Avianca, etc….
Huh? Really? Airline redemption flight points-plus-pay deals are very expensive unless you are using one of those complicated tricky deals through the US.
Most people reading Point Hacks would be arranging redemption flights through Australian based airlines- so why not point out one of that the best way of getting top up points is to phone the number on the back of an American Express issued credit cards and ask to buy points ($25 per 1,000 ascent reward points, in your account within days) or if you already have some hotel points in an SPG account, by buying top up points to 20,000 so they are transferred with a bonus 5,000 to the SPG affiliated airlines (takes a bit longer but still useful).
Sorry guys, the new articles are a bit simple for me. I miss Keith’s lack of sales pitch and am going back to flyer talk:(
Hey Samantha – now where in this piece does Sam mention Points+Pay, though I agree that that is usually poor value from local airlines. Buying miles from the likes of American, Alaska and United is not too hard and is well worth of being aware of for the beginner. It does take a bit of understanding and research, true, but can yield great deals. With the current exchange rate and other factors like program devaluations this may become less and less appealing – will be interesting to see as the rest of this year shakes out.
Amex MR points purchase is an interesting option. Given this is an intro piece it hasn’t been included as you need to have an MR card to do so, but in hindsight it might have been best to mention it. We’ll get it updated.
I’ll be publishing more in coming weeks. Taking a little break at the minute, but don’t worry, we’ll continue trying to cater to as many readers as possible.
The points plus pay system by Qantas is something that fooled many Australian in thinking that’s the way to redeem a ticket. It led me to believe that to redeem a business class ticket would be take millions of points and thought I could never achieve it, so I wasted hundred of thousands of precious credit card points on gift cards.
I agree many PH readers will be only interested on Australian based frequent flyer program. But I think it’s important to change their mind to let them know that by buying AA points can actually redeem QF flights. Otherwise people will continue to be ripped off by our local airlines by paying a large premium. Australian has been treated like fools for too long! It is the 21st century and I think people have the right to know that we don’t have to be stuck with QF and VA.
Buying miles from airlines is a common practice in many overseas based airline. They frequently run special promotions. Such concept is not unfamiliar to Americans and Europeans at all. But for us, we still think “buying miles” = “points plus pay” by Qantas or the mile top up (also by Qantas) and immediately think it’s poor value.
I agree it takes a bit of research, but even for beginners, at least let them know that there is such thing as “buying miles” and you can even buy it with zero balance in your account.
Hi Samantha,
Thanks for the feedback. As Keith mentioned above, this is a ‘beginners’ series we’re running for people who’ve never really done the points thing. As such, this, and the other articles are all aimed at beginners, with nothing too complex or scary. We’re trying to cover as broad a cross-section as we can, so have elected to not focus on any specifics, such as Amex rewards, as this excludes many readers.
Also, as Keith pointed out, we don’t mention points+pay as we don’t see it as a valuable option either.
Everyone has to start somewhere, and we’re hoping to be able to introduce more people to points earning by running some more introductory articles. There are links in the above article to some of Keith’s more in-depth pieces for those who wish to explore further.