{"id":21408,"date":"2011-04-22T20:00:15","date_gmt":"2011-04-23T00:00:15","guid":{"rendered":"\/\/www.askmrcreditcard.com\/news\/?p=21408"},"modified":"2011-04-22T20:00:15","modified_gmt":"2011-04-23T00:00:15","slug":"redeeming-partner-awards-with-us-airways-is-really-challenging","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.askmrcreditcard.com\/news\/redeeming-partner-awards-with-us-airways-is-really-challenging\/","title":{"rendered":"Redeeming Partner Awards With US Airways Is Really Challenging"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Back in late 2009, I told you about the US Airways promotion where you could essentially <a href=\"\/\/www.askmrcreditcard.com\/news\/ing-miles-through-a-promotion\/\"> miles at about .5 cents each.<\/a> Myself and others I know spend thousands of dollars ing hundreds of thousands of miles.\u00a0 While I had used a few miles here and there in the past, I finally got around to planning a fantastic trip with the hundreds of thousands of miles I had left.<\/p>\n<p><strong>US Airways Doesn&#8217;t Make It Easy<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>If you want to redeem your miles for a domestic or international award entirely on flights operated by US Airways, you can search for it and book it fairly easily on their web site.\u00a0 That said, they use a three tiered award system with the &#8220;Low&#8221; awards being extremely scarce. It is easy to find entire months with now &#8220;low&#8221; awards on a particular route. \u00a0 The real value of the miles is booking a partner award, but it is very hard to do so.\u00a0 They do not have an online booking tool, so you have to call them up.\u00a0 Consider that there are over a dozen members of the Star Alliance, there are hundreds of combinations of dates and flights that can get you to your destination.\u00a0 At the same time, the people at US Airways really do not have any effective tools to search for those flights.\u00a0 If you leave the searching to them, they are likely to try a few combinations, tell you there is nothing available, and give up.<\/p>\n<p><strong>The Key To Finding Award Space<\/strong><\/p>\n<p><!--more-->Ultimately, you will have to do their work for them.\u00a0 The only way you can effectively find the open space on the flights you want is to search the web site of the one partner that shows award space available online, Al Nippon Airways of Japan, or ANA.\u00a0 Your first step is to create an account with ANA.\u00a0 Next, you search for partner awards.\u00a0 It is not as easy as putting in your origin and destination, you will actually have to specify each city pair for each flight along the way.\u00a0 You do this one by one until you find the space you need on each flight to get you to your destination.\u00a0 You will quickly learn that the longer the flight is, the harder it will be to find award space, so you search for those first.\u00a0 Only then will you find the shorter flights to connect you to and from the international gateways on your itinerary.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Calling US Airways<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>This is where the fun begins.\u00a0 US Airways has not bothered to train all of their people to search for partner awards.\u00a0 You will often find yourself speaking with someone who just won&#8217;t accept the fact that you have already done the searching for your seats.\u00a0 You then have to politely hang up and call back.\u00a0 The other problem is that the award redemption rules are manually enforced by different agents in different ways.\u00a0 Some will make up their own rules and insist on their validity, even when you read contradictory rules to them right from US Airway&#8217;s own website!\u00a0 Others will not be aware of any of the rules and will allow you to book just about anything their computer will let them.\u00a0 In all cases I remained polite and appreciative in order to encourage their co-operation. In the end, it took me six calls to find the right person who was willing and able to book our itinerary to the middle east, with a stopover in Europe on the way home.<\/p>\n<p><strong>You Are Going To Need A Lot Of Patience<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>In addition to having to call over and over again to find the right agent, this is still an arduous process. On my final call, finding, booking, confirming, pricing taxes and fees, and paying for my itinerary took all of two hours on the phone!\u00a0 Only then did I have to go to each partner&#8217;s website, enter my confirmation code, and select my seating assignments.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Patience Pays Off<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>I spent about $3,000 on the TrackItBack product in order to earn about 475,000 Dividend Miles.\u00a0 I then donated the product to charity and took a write off roughly equal to the taxes and fees I paid on my itinerary.\u00a0 Therefore, $3,000 is a rough estimate for my out of pocket expense for three business class tickets to the middle east with stopover in Europe on the return (120,000 miles each), and I still have 115,000 miles left.\u00a0 Since our three tickets are\u00a0 mostly on Lufthansa, I decided to go directly to Lufthansa&#8217;s website to see what they would have cost if I wanted to pay cash for them.\u00a0 They priced out at over $22,000!\u00a0 Granted, my itinerary is not perfect.\u00a0 For example, I am traveling from Europe to Denver via Miami, but I think the $19,000 savings is worth an extra few hours enjoying Lufthansa&#8217;s superb business class, especially considering my Frankfurt to Miami flight will be on their all new, A380 Super-Jumbo.<\/p>\n<p>In the end, it was probably worth the 2-3 hours I spent calling US Airways as well.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Back in late 2009, I told you about the US Airways promotion where you could essentially miles at about .5 cents each. Myself and others I know spend thousands of dollars ing hundreds of thousands of miles.\u00a0 While I had used a few miles here and there in the past, I finally got around to [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[8],"tags":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v19.10 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Redeeming Partner Awards With US Airways Is Really Challenging<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.askmrcreditcard.com\/news\/redeeming-partner-awards-with-us-airways-is-really-challenging\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Redeeming Partner Awards With US Airways Is Really Challenging\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Back in late 2009, I told you about the US Airways promotion where you could essentially miles at about .5 cents each. Myself and others I know spend thousands of dollars ing hundreds of thousands of miles.\u00a0 While I had used a few miles here and there in the past, I finally got around to [&hellip;]\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.askmrcreditcard.com\/news\/redeeming-partner-awards-with-us-airways-is-really-challenging\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"Ask Mr Credit Card Blog\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2011-04-23T00:00:15+00:00\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"Jason Steele\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"Jason Steele\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"4 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\/\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.askmrcreditcard.com\/news\/redeeming-partner-awards-with-us-airways-is-really-challenging\/\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/www.askmrcreditcard.com\/news\/redeeming-partner-awards-with-us-airways-is-really-challenging\/\",\"name\":\"Redeeming Partner Awards With US Airways Is Really Challenging\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.askmrcreditcard.com\/news\/#website\"},\"datePublished\":\"2011-04-23T00:00:15+00:00\",\"dateModified\":\"2011-04-23T00:00:15+00:00\",\"author\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.askmrcreditcard.com\/news\/#\/schema\/person\/18331587d05ff4eaeee29fd913227597\"},\"breadcrumb\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.askmrcreditcard.com\/news\/redeeming-partner-awards-with-us-airways-is-really-challenging\/#breadcrumb\"},\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"ReadAction\",\"target\":[\"https:\/\/www.askmrcreditcard.com\/news\/redeeming-partner-awards-with-us-airways-is-really-challenging\/\"]}]},{\"@type\":\"BreadcrumbList\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.askmrcreditcard.com\/news\/redeeming-partner-awards-with-us-airways-is-really-challenging\/#breadcrumb\",\"itemListElement\":[{\"@type\":\"ListItem\",\"position\":1,\"name\":\"Home\",\"item\":\"https:\/\/www.askmrcreditcard.com\/news\/\"},{\"@type\":\"ListItem\",\"position\":2,\"name\":\"Redeeming Partner Awards With US Airways Is Really Challenging\"}]},{\"@type\":\"WebSite\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.askmrcreditcard.com\/news\/#website\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/www.askmrcreditcard.com\/news\/\",\"name\":\"Ask Mr Credit Card Blog\",\"description\":\"Just another WordPress site\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"SearchAction\",\"target\":{\"@type\":\"EntryPoint\",\"urlTemplate\":\"https:\/\/www.askmrcreditcard.com\/news\/?s={search_term_string}\"},\"query-input\":\"required name=search_term_string\"}],\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\"},{\"@type\":\"Person\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.askmrcreditcard.com\/news\/#\/schema\/person\/18331587d05ff4eaeee29fd913227597\",\"name\":\"Jason Steele\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/www.askmrcreditcard.com\/news\/author\/jsteele\/\"}]}<\/script>\n<!-- \/ Yoast SEO plugin. -->","yoast_head_json":{"title":"Redeeming Partner Awards With US Airways Is Really Challenging","robots":{"index":"index","follow":"follow","max-snippet":"max-snippet:-1","max-image-preview":"max-image-preview:large","max-video-preview":"max-video-preview:-1"},"canonical":"https:\/\/www.askmrcreditcard.com\/news\/redeeming-partner-awards-with-us-airways-is-really-challenging\/","og_locale":"en_US","og_type":"article","og_title":"Redeeming Partner Awards With US Airways Is Really Challenging","og_description":"Back in late 2009, I told you about the US Airways promotion where you could essentially miles at about .5 cents each. 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