How We Book International Flights Using Points & Miles
Overview
Booking international flights using points and miles can be overwhelming. I love a good challenge, though! Since I’m mapping out a future international trip for our family, I thought I’d take the opportunity to walk you through our process.
Choose a destination
Sometimes this is easier said than done for us travel addicts. In our case, we want to begin planning a trip to Greece because it’s been on our list forever!
Decide when you want to go
Usually we’re pretty flexible with our travel dates, unless we’re planning around the kids’ school breaks. It definitely helps if you can be flexible. Typically, airlines post their schedules about 11 months in advance, so that’s something to keep in mind. In this instance, we want to go to Greece sometime next year, but we’re pretty flexible on timing.
Research flight options
If we’re flying stateside, I always start by looking at the Southwest website because it’s our favorite airline to fly as a family. It’s a super simple process to book our tickets using Southwest points.
However, in this case, because we’re flying internationally and Southwest doesn’t fly to Greece, I need to start at the drawing board by using an award travel search engine. My favorite one at the moment is called PointsYeah.
11 months from now is March 2025, so let’s use that as our example. I always search for one-way tickets because it’s easier for me to manage mentally. And there’s really no advantage to booking round trip tickets when using points and miles.
On the PointsYeah site, I search for Pittsburgh to Athens and plug in March 12-15 for my departure window (one of the reasons I love PointsYeah is because it gives you the option to search a flexible window of four days instead of just one specific day).
The search results display the lowest points price first. The first option is on March 12 and it lists a price of 24,000 points because of a discount through April 30, but the non-discounted price is 29,000 points + $108.34 in taxes. This is a great deal coming from Pittsburgh, which isn’t a major hub of any kind. I like this option a lot.
I also like that this flight is via KLM. Air France/KLM is part of the SkyTeam alliance and their points currency is called Flying Blue miles. A really cool thing about booking a flight on Air France/KLM is that they offer a discount for kids under age 12 (whether you pay with cash or miles). On KLM flights the discount varies, but in our example it’s 20%. This is a huge win for families like ours!
Another special thing about Flying Blue is that all four major banks transfer points to the program. This means that it’s quite easy to rack up Flying Blue miles because you can transfer Chase, Capital One, Amex or Citi points there.
If I were ready to book this flight for March 2025, I would do so ASAP because award flights notoriously change on a whim. If you see something you like and you have the miles in your account, book it! (Note: It can take some time for points to transfer to certain reward programs, including Flying Blue. It’s not usually immediate, so plan accordingly.)
From the PointsYeah screenshot above, I simply click the link in the bottom right-hand corner and it takes me to the KLM site to book the flight. When I get to the KLM site, I log into my Flying Blue account. From there, I update the passengers to two adults and three youth to get a full picture as to the points price and taxes we’d need to pay.
You can see the total price for our five one-way tickets to Athens would be 128,500 miles and $564.50! I mean…who can fly a family of five to Europe for less than $600? I can (and so can you)!
Next, I ran another search using PointsYeah for our return trip home. It returned a similar points price as the flight there. So for planning purposes, I can estimate about 250,000 points and $1,100 in taxes roundtrip for all five of us.
Earn the Points
Now…what if you don’t have these points saved up yet? That’s simple. Go through this flight searching exercise to get a feel for the type and quantity of points you’d need and then open new credit cards accordingly!
In this case, since all four major banks transfer to Flying Blue, I have a lot of options. I personally like to transfer my Chase points to Southwest or Hyatt (because Chase is the only bank that transfers to those brands, and we love both of them), so I would focus on opening a Capital One, Amex or Citi card and transfer those points to Flying Blue.
In fact, I recently opened an Amex Gold card with a special 150,000 point welcome bonus. I could refer Mark to the card and earn a 20,000 referral bonus. Mark could apply for the card and meet the minimum spend to earn another 70,000 points (which is the standard offer). This would give us a grand total of 240,000 points. When you factor in the additional points we’d earn from regular spending on these cards, we’d have more than enough points for all five of us to fly to and from Europe by opening just two credit cards.
Conclusion
Researching international award travel flights can be daunting, and I get that. But if you have a strategy and begin planning in advance, it’s totally doable. Start the researching process by using an award travel search engine like PointsYeah to estimate how many points you’d need. Search for one-way tickets to keep things simple and remember to be flexible with your travel dates if possible. Figure out which cards to open in order to earn the necessary points, and focus on meeting those minimum spends over the next several months. Before you know it, you’ll be booking your own international award flights!
If you’re interested in learning more about creating a strategy based on your travel goals, let me know! I offer 1:1 strategy sessions for exactly this purpose via our Services page.
