Pick Your Program, Accelerate Your Earning

The ultimate goal of collecting frequent flyer points is to fly Business or First Class on an award ticket. To get there as quickly as possible, you want to pick the frequent flyer program that gives you the most points for the tickets you most frequently buy.

Qantas has 13 fare buckets just for Economy Class seats, which allows them to manage the revenue from a specific flight. In return for higher fares you will earn more points so Flexible Economy (B,H,Y) earns more than Economy (G,K,L,M,S,V), which in turn earns more than Discount Economy (E,N,O,Q).

Most people would book the cheapest suitable flight, which typically means a Discount Economy fare. For a Sydney (SYD) to Los Angeles (LAX) flight, that would mean earning 4,500 Qantas Frequent Flyer points (which is about 60% of the actual distance flown) instead of 6,750 for a Saver Fare or 9,000 for a Flex Fare. 

But what if you could earn 100% of the miles flown for a Discount Economy fare? Alaska Airlines Mileage Plan is a Qantas partner and all Discount Economy fare codes except E will earn 100% miles flown.

To find out how many miles between city pairs you can use the Great Circle Mapper. 

The Qantas example above is just one of the many combinations of fare code and frequent flyer program that a savvy traveller needs to navigate so thankfully there is a great website called Where To Credit that does the hard work for you.

Tip: Plug in the airline you are flying and the fare code on wheretocredit.com to find the program that will give you the most miles