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Over the weekend, Ian Snyder at Miles to Memories posted some great news about Turkish Airlines Miles & Smiles: some domestic United Airlines flights can be booked online for just 7,500 miles each way (including to places like Hawaii and Alaska). While we broke the story on that sweet spot last month, we initially thought that booking had to be done via email. We later posted that bookings could be made via phone, which has been true for many (but not all) readers. The expansion to being able to book online is an amazing development, but it’s a mixed bag. I had a number of theories about what could and couldn’t be booked with Turkish Miles & Smiles, and the online tool only amplified my confusion. Here are my bumbling experiments thus far.
How to book Turkish Miles & Smiles Star Alliance awards online
For those who want to jump straight into searching the online tool, I’ll save you twenty minutes of frustration if you missed Ian’s post: First, log into your account. Then, click the drop-down menu to the right of your name (in the top right corner). Choose “Miles Transactions” and then look for the “Star Alliance Award Ticket” area and click “Book Now”.
That will take you to the Star Alliance booking tool, which looks exactly like the booking tool on the home page, only it works for searching Star Alliance awards (whereas the one on the home page apparently doesn’t). From there, it’s self-explanatory…if your itinerary prices.
Note that you cannot specify a cabin. I only found economy class awards online. There is no ability to search one-way for Star Alliance awards nor to book one-way Star Alliance awards online (though I’ve had no trouble booking one way over the phone).
My assumptions & Ian’s findings
To give some framework for my bumbling experiments below, I first have to outline the assumptions upon which I’d been working and the findings that Ian reported over the weekend.
When we first reported the ability to book domestic United one-way awards for 7,500 miles each way in economy class or 12,500 miles each way in business class, some readers reported being quoted double those numbers of miles on their itineraries. As soon as we dug into the details, it became apparent that Turkish must enforce a maximum connection time of 4 hours on a domestic ticket. I based that assumption on two things: first, a reader reported being quoted double the miles (15K one-way) for an itinerary with a connection of just over 4 hours while another reader with a connection of about 3.5hrs reported being quoted a price of 7,500 miles. Second, Singapore Airlines imposes this same restriction on domestic economy class awards. The dots seemed to connect quickly on this, so we let people know that the max connection time is 4 hours and that seemed to hold up based on reader comments / non-comments.
Separately, we’ve received a handful of reports from readers who say that phone agents haven’t been able to find availability on routes that otherwise appear available via United.com. I’ve personally traded emails with a couple of readers in this situation and checked their itineraries and have been perplexed as to why Turkish can’t see the available award space. It’s not the number of connections: I had no trouble booking itineraries with 1 or 2 stops, which matches the numbers of stops on failed itineraries submitted by those couple of readers. It’s not booking from a small airport as I had no trouble booking from Albany, NY (which also eliminates the theory that Turkish is unable to ticket small regional flights). It’s not married segment logic as the segments in question are available individually and together at United.com. The only common thread I saw was that in several instances of itineraries that Turkish said were unavailable, the first connection was less than one hour. Could Turkish have a minimum connection time of an hour? That didn’t really make sense as I think (in at least some cases) the Turkish agents were reporting the first flight unavailable before even getting the details of the second flight. But hold on to this (weak) theory about minimum connection time for a moment.
Those assumptions / questions were mine before reading Ian’s piece. If you haven’t yet read his post on booking online, you should. However, I’ll summarize some of Ian’s key findings for quick reference:
- One-way awards don’t work online. You must search round trip if you’re using the online tool (but you can book one-way over the phone).
- Many routings that are available at United.com do not show up at Turkish Airlines.
- Only some itineraries price at 7,500 miles each way online. Ian lists 9 cities that price at 7500 miles each way to Honolulu. He goes on to say, “At some point, though, roughly between central time and eastern time, the awards switched to 11,250 miles each way. I also had trouble pricing out many routes, but Detroit, Atlanta and Washington Dulles were offered at this rate. If you can get these for 7,500 miles each way by calling, that’s the better way to go.”
- Even when direct flights are available, the system sometimes forces a connection (for example, rather than allowing a nonstop round trip award between San Francisco and Honolulu, the options presented required connecting through Los Angeles or vice versa).
- Some airports are not available in the online tool (like Newark-EWR).
- You may have trouble booking a ticket for someone else online.
Now let’s get to work on the experiments.
My first assumption: Maximum connection time….maybe not
My theory about a max connect time of 4 hours has seemed to have held up for phone bookings (we’ve received no contrary reports). This assumption felt like the most solid of any we had.
That is, it did until I got to playing with the online tool. As you can see, this itinerary (which is available for 7,500 miles each way) has an overnight layover of more than eleven hours.
There goes my max connect theory. And no, this wasn’t the only one I found with a long connection. To be clear, I don’t think you can book that over the phone. But you can online.
My second assumption: Minimum connection time….maybe not
I admitted that the minimum connection time theory was weak. However, I was grasping for straws. Turns out whomever flies HNL-LAX-DEN gets the short straw — or the short layover, anyway.
At just 39 minutes, that shot my minimum connection time down. Ian also shot this down, showing an itinerary with a 28 minute connection.
Ian’s findings
First up, I think he’s right that you can’t book one-way United awards online. Back before I initially wrote about this sweet spot, I tried searching online. Based on some information at Flyertalk, I thought that it was somehow possible but that maybe it required some knowledge of coding. Silly me: I had only searched one-way and had failed to find the Star Alliance booking tool. As Ian notes, you must book round trip if you book online – there’s simply no option to choose a one-way search.
Ian’s also undoubtedly correct that the Turkish website shows far less availability than United does at United.com
Eastern US to Hawaii for 7500 each way
However, Ian also noted at at some point between Central and Eastern time, flights began pricing at 11,250 miles each way for some inexplicable reason. Fortunately, I didn’t find that to be geographical, nor did I find 7500-mile flights to be limited to the nine cities listed. Here’s Boston to Honolulu for 7,500 miles each way:
And Washington, DC to Honolulu for 7500 each way:
As Ian notes, even though Turkish doesn’t include EWR in the airports for the search tool, you can connect through it. For example, here’s Detroit to Honolulu for 7500 miles each way.
Oddly, Detroit was one of the routes that Ian found priced at 11,250 miles each way, but I found it at 7500.
Some flights do price higher, but why?
I did find that flights between Denver and Honolulu price at 11,250 miles each way just as he said — and I can’t figure out why. At first, I thought hat perhaps it was some sort of mixed-cabin pricing like Avianca LifeMiles? I wondered whether maybe one short leg on just one of the available itineraries might be in business class and therefore driving up the price. Alas, I checked each leg and each was available in economy class.
Interestingly, you can see above that in addition to options that connect in San Francisco or Los Angeles, the direct flight from Denver is available. It was available in both directions on the dates I checked. That defies the notion that one must have connections in order for the itinerary to price online….though at 50% more expensive than it should be, I probably wouldn’t book that online. I’d call.
But direct flights aren’t consistently available from other gateways — even when they should be. For example, I found a set of dates where flights from Seattle to San Francisco to Honolulu were available for 7500 miles each way. Yet, despite connecting through San Francisco each way on that Seattle itinerary, a search originating in San Francisco came up empty. I similarly couldn’t get the tool to price any dates directly from Houston even when there was saver space on the nonstop available to both LifeMiles and Aeroplan.
And the increased 11,250-mile pricing wasn’t limited to Denver or Hawaii. Here’s Chicago to Anchorage for 11,250 miles each way.
Though it’s at least kind of interesting to me that the above connects in Denver.
Direct flights from Chicago to Los Angeles price at 7500 each way. So do flights from Chicago to Maui.
Perhaps Denver is the problem for some reason? It’s inconclusive.
Some airports don’t show up in the tool….or do they?
Ian notes that some airports, like Newark (EWR), are seemingly not loaded into the online tool for searching (even though airports like EWR do show as available connecting points). He’s sorta right about that — if you try to type Newark or EWR into the search box, the online tool won’t find the airport.
However, if you empty the airport cell out, you’ll get a link that says “see all destinations”.
Those familiar with booking Virgin Atlantic awards online will see where I’m going with this. When you scroll the airports in the United States, guess what shows up?
Ready for the fun part? You can’t click on it. Believe me, I tried. I tried clicking it over and over. I wanted that to work. It didn’t.
But, it gives me hope that one of Ian’s final conclusions (not listed above) is true. He proposes the following:
It’s possible this Star Alliance booking functionality is in beta and Turkish didn’t mean to release it. It sure feels like it.
Now that’s a sentence with which I can optimistically concur.
Bottom Line
The ability to book at least some Turkish Miles & Smiles awards online is huge for those who don’t want to spend the time on the phone feeding segments to an agent. I still can’t believe that it’s possible to fly to Hawaii for just 15,000 miles round trip and it’s now even easier for folks in some cities to book those flights online.
Unfortunately, the online tool definitely doesn’t show everything that is bookable via the phone. For example, I couldn’t get any itineraries to price from my home airport despite having booked over the phone already.
One other potential hang-up here could be in booking tickets for other people. Ian notes that he wasn’t totally sure that it could be done. See his post for more detail, but I’m similarly unsure whether or not you’ll be able to book a ticket for someone else online.
Fortunately, phone bookings via the Turkish call center do work in most cases — so you should be able to call and book over the phone if you can’t book with your companion online. Assuming Turkish sees the availability, that process should be pretty easy. If only we could figure out a pattern as to what availability Turkish can see, that process would get easier yet. The online booking tool hasn’t made that pattern easier for me to find, but I sure haven’t given up yet.
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I first tried out booking a one-way trip MSP to CMH with TK, and it worked fine. Was very satisfied, even if it wasn’t a big savings over 10k miles if I had booked through United directly. So, I decided to try Hawaii. Although the UA site shows plenty of saver awards between MSP and LIH or HNL (and none of the ones I can see on UA use Hawaiian or a regional airline), the TK phone agent was unable to find *any* availability on award flights out of MSP for any day in the month of May 2020. Not one. single. flight. I even asked him to try ORD on a few dates, and he still couldn’t find anything. I asked him to try March. Nope. Now I have 30k points locked up in TK that I hope I’ll be able to find a trip for.
From my recent experience, it’s best to just HUCA. First agent I spoke with said she only saw connecting flights from LAX to HNL, through SFO. Called back a couple minutes later, and the next agent I spoke with saw the direct flights I mentioned and was easily able to book it.
Try emailing a local ticket US office. I booked via email and it was relatively straight forward. Just send them the exact dates times and segments you want to book.
[…] Book Turkish awards online: My bumbling experiments […]
I tried to book a Air Canada flight from YYZ to DFW over phone and agent quoted me 10K miles and 115CAD in taxes and fees. When I look at the fare breakdown on ITA Software and add up all the taxes and fees over and above the base fare it only adds up to 95 CAD and there are no YQ charges. Also, when I price that same flight on UA website it only shows $47.83 in taxes and fees. Hence I am confused as to how Turkish is calculating the fees. Any thoughts? Do you think booking a UA flight from YYZ to DFW will result in lower taxes and fees than the AC flight?
I have no idea. Haven’t tried anything to/from Canada yet.
Air Canada levies fuel surcharges the United does not pass on. Why it doesn’t match ITA, I don’t know.
Not only does it not match ITA but there is no YQ line item in the fare breakdown so fuel surcharges don’t have any role in this situation.
My experience booking 20 people to and from Hawaii so far using this deal:
1) All bookings were initiated and completed over the phone. Usually ticketed in the first call but was offered a free hold if we wanted one. As most of these were coming back from a different island than going to, they needed to be booked as two one-ways. Tried a couple times to book an Open jaw in a single record without success then just fed the agents one-ways.
2) Always followed the 4 hour rule after getting a quote earlier on for twice the miles when the connection was a little over 4 house. Most booking were two flights, some 3 flights.
3) Was always quoted 7500 miles one-way per person; never 11250 or any other amount.
4) Shortest connection booked is under 40 minutes; longest nearly 4 hours. Bookings included a variety of mainline aircraft including wide bodies and premium trans-con aircraft for some of them; all narrow body on others. Did not attempt to include regional flights yet.
5) A few times had to hang up and call again because the agent did not speak English sufficiently or categorically did not seem to know how to find UA miles space.
6) Did successfully route through EWR even though that airport doesn’t exist online.
7) Found the best way was to always give the phone rep one flight at a time; after they find the first one give the next flight. Giving origin and destination would often result in the agent not seeing anything available or seeing an itinerary with a longer than 4 hour connection that would then price higher if selected or suggesting options like routing via IST or Canada between the US mainland and Hawaii.
8) So many times was told flights were not available in their system that should have theoretically been available. These were all UA mainline flights and were available individually, so not a married segment or operated by issue. Could not find a pattern; have been trying. Due to this problem, my solution was to find 3 completely different acceptable routings before each call and move on to the next routing option when I got to a flight an agent didn’t see as available. That worked for most of them but on the last booking, all three did not work. The first or second or third segment was a problem with all three. Found more options and option 5 did work. I wish I could say there was something different about option 5 from the rest but no…Did try waiting a day to see if that would make options 1 or 2 available and but no.
Only the first booking included the TK account holder as a passenger.
Each booking took between 40 minutes and 1:30 on the phone to complete; soooo inefficient but worth it in this case.
Just created a account and trying to look at sample flights and its coming up with nothing, am i supposed to xfer miles first?
Thanks
Are you sure you’re on the Star Alliance award tool? See the instructions near the beginning of the post. Assuming you are searching in the right place, if you don’t get any results it means nothing is available for online booking. That doesn’t mean that nothing is available for phone booking. As noted in the post, there’s a lot of inconsistency. Some flights that really are available don’t show as available online. It’s kind of a frustrating exercise.
But note that you definitely don’t need miles in your account to search. There are 0 miles in the account used for all of the screen shots in this post.
Was looking for ORD-HNL on united website and saw plenty of reward tickets available but not all economy saver ( 22k miles some are just normal economy (45k miles). The ones that show higher then 22K are not seen on Turkish air website. Would they be available if i called them ?
No. Only saver awards are available to partners.
Something interesting I found is my first booking can only be for myself, and it does not let me search if I try to book more than 1 person, the website is saying I must book the first flight for only me in order to verify my account. I made it to the Star Award booking search engine, but it does not show me any results at all, it just does its search for a few seconds, and then returns me to the search screen. Is this just a bug? Or do I have to have actual miles in my account in order to display results?
No, that means it isn’t seeing any availability on your route.
Dang, that sucks. It looks like OMA might not have any flights available then, since they only have the regional carriers operate out of there.
I’m having the same problem even when UA shows availability. Did you notice when that happens the date shown in text is one day different than the date that is graphically highlighted?
SO I have tried like 5 times with three browsers and I can not even create an account with Miles and Smiles. The password line is buggy and apparently only allows numbers, but it will not take my numbers for some reason. Any tips?
Try exactly six numbers.
Password has to be exactly six numbers and must not repeat the same number more than 2 times.
Thanks. I have tried that. I no longer get a password error message. I just hit submit, the ticker thinks, and it comes back to my application as if nothing happened.
NM I just hit submit again without changing anything and it worked. Bizare
try making an account through the app
Glad you’re taking my exercise in frustration further, Nick! It was a cool find, but still ended up not meeting my needs and I’ve had to call every time to book. Now if we can somehow figure out the 11,250 pricing, I’ll be satisfied. Glad that’s not as overarching an issue.
On the other routes where you found 11,250-mile pricing, did they all connect through Denver?
They did not. The DTW to HNL I found at that price had only SFO and EWR connections offered. But you found said itinerary priced at 7,500 each way.
It does appear to be charging you for three segments, and then dividing that in half for the final price. I had connection time theories, but you’ve quickly run through those as well.
Well now I’m perplexed. I’m looking at a nonstop from ORD-HNL. JuicyMiles shows *eight* seats available via LifeMiles, Asiana, Miles & More, Thai. For some reason, only five seats available through Aeroplan. I need 3 seats. Turkish says all seats are taken.
I don’t understand that one at all. They only see ORD-SFO-HNL, nothing nonstop. (I’m actually looking to connect in Chicago, but when that failed I had them try the direct). I’m not seeing it online, either (searching RT on days with availability).
Weird.
I’m not surprised that it doesn’t come up online, as that was what I experienced searching from SFO/LAX for nonstops. But that is a serious (and concerning) mismatch of space when asking over the phone. I wonder where JM pulls their inventory for this one, as it must be grabbing something besides Aeroplan to show 8 seats.
Don’t one-way flights on partner airlines technically not allowed? On Miles&Smiles website, it states “On partner flights, one-way award tickets cannot be issued where Turkish Airlines does not operate the flights”. Perhaps the phone agents just weren’t aware of the terms?
https://www.turkishairlines.com/en-int/miles-and-smiles/awards/
It also says this:
*Star Alliance award tickets can also be issued as one-way tickets.
There is a lot of contradictory information on that page.
Yes, it’s certainly one of the more confusing programs… Thanks for all your good work on this program. Hopefully these sweet spots will remain for awhile.
Have booked 20 people to and from Hawaii so far using this deal, mostly as one-ways. Not a single TK phone agent suggested a problem with one-ways.
All the newbies to the Turkish redemption games lack a lot of information that the one who actually used the airline knows.
One thing the is missing from your article (and again, I doubt you’ll ever figure it out yourself) that Turkish miles cannot be used on the regional partners of UA. Even thought it is UA flight number and otherwise will considered a UA flight, every time there is DBA as UA you’ll find that Turkish cannot book those flights.
Greg guessed at that, but I thought we eliminated that theory. Guess I’d better double check my notes now.
I’ve busted the regional partner theory, albeit unintentionally. Currently have two itineraries booked over the phone that include a segment departing ACV. We are only served by SlyWest. And one of these showed up online, I just needed a one-way.
Just did a check over a couple more routes. If you check IAH-TUL, 8/2 out, 8/9 return, TK returns ExpressJet, Mesa Airlines, and SkyWest options. There may be other issues, but this tells me they support regional partners satisfactorily.
Nice work, Ian.