Strange bedfellows: Airline partnerships you might be missing

Arline partnerships provide opportunities to get terrific value for your miles. In many cases, booking a partner award (where you use miles from Airline X to fly on Airline Y) presents the best value for the miles/points. Once you get to know the three major alliances (oneworld, SkyTeam, and Star Alliance), most partnerships become obvious. That is to say that once you recognize that United is in Star Alliance, it becomes intuitive that you can redeem United miles for travel on any Star Alliance airline or that you can use any Star Alliance airline program to book travel on United. However, there are some partnerships that defy alliances. It can be easy to forget these “hidden” award booking options.

While I have a rather firm handle on airline alliances, I have to admit that I don’t have every airline partnership memorized. I imagine most people don’t. This is where, for me, the usefulness of a tool like Point.me or Award Logic really shines. I’ve been using Point.me since its inception in part because we have an affiliate relationship and so I’ve had easy access to the tool, but we’ve compared award search tools a few times. The bottom line is that using a kayak-like award search tool has often reminded me of alliances of which I’d have otherwise forgotten (and several examples in this post came directly from searches I had done at Point.me).

This post isn’t meant to be an exhaustive list of “hidden” partnerships, but rather a few that have stumbled to the front of mine lately. The key reminder here is that once you’ve found availability that looks interesting, it’s always worth digging deeper to research all of the ways that might make sense to book it. It’s easy to forget some.

Here are a handful of examples of these strange bedfellows partnerships that I’ve run across recently.

Redeem Air France / KLM Flying Blue miles on Copa Airlines

South American Airline Copa is an airline that I automatically and exclusively associate with Star Alliance in no small part because of the fact that their logo and font is basically the old Continental logo. A couple of years ago, I was helping a friend find a ticket between the US and Brazil using using JuicyMiles (a tool that no longer exists that had similar functionality to Point.me and Award Logic) and I stumbled on an award result on Copa using Air France / KLM Flying Blue miles. This partnership is briefly noted in my “Best ways to get to South America using miles” post, but it’s one I still tend to forget about unless and until I’m using a search tool like Point.me and I accidentally stumble upon it.

I’m currently only seeing availability to use miles on itineraries that connect Copa destinations outside of the United States, but that could still be quite useful if you’re looking to do some travel around the Caribbean / Latin America.

Redeem Avianca LifeMiles on Aeromexico

Here’s a partnership that had somehow completely escaped me until a recent search for availability to South America — did you know that Star Alliance program Avianca LifeMiles partners with SkyTeam founding member AeroMexico? Once again, I stumbled upon the award above on Point.me as I was looking for availability to Santiago, Chile and almost exclusively finding flights on Copa (most of which only feature recliner seats). AeroMexico operates a 787 between Mexico City and Santiago, which would mean a flat-bed seat on that 8hr flight.

Again, I only stumbled on this option thanks to Point.me as I neither knew about the AeroMexico partnership nor would I have likely found it when using LifeMiles.com. As we’ve noted in the past, Avianca has several ways to search for an award. The default is “Smart Search”, but you can also choose to search “Star Alliance” or an individual airline for availability.

When I searched the above itinerary from Chicago to Santiago on LifeMiles.com, the initial results I saw with SmartSearch enabled were on Copa and/or Avianca. I had to select “AeroMexico” from the search drop-down to find those AeroMexico flights — which I only knew to do because I had seen the availability using Point.me.

Aer Lingus partners with United MileagePlus (plus, earn Avios flying American, United, Alaska, or JetBlue)

You probably primarily associate Aer Lingus with Avios, which makes sense since it shares that currency with British Airways, Iberia, and Qatar. However, Aer Lingus does not belong to oneworld and only has a few select airline partnerships.

If you’re looking to fly transatlantic business class, you’re still probably best off redeeming Avios for your flight if you find Aer Lingus availability. However, if you’re a fan of the Avios program, it’s worth remembering that United partners with Aer Lingus because it means that you can earn Avios on United flights if you credit them to Aer Lingus.

Fun fact: it is possible to earn Avios flying American Airlines, United (credit to AerLingus), JetBlue (credit to Qatar), and Alaska Airlines. While I’d personally rather earn another airline currency (I don’t use Avios nearly as often as other programs), it’s nonetheless kind of cool that you could fly many different US airlines and stockpile miles in a single(ish?) program by combining your Avios.

Air Canada partners with what feels like everyone

It’s hard to mention surprising partnerships without noting that Air Canada partners will more airlines than most of us can name (they have nearly 50 airline partners!). From Etihad to Emirates to Bamboo Airways to Oman Air to Virgin Australia to a multitude of other airlines, it can be easy to forget which options you have when booking an Air Canada award.

Thankfully, Air Canada’s website is very easy / intuitive to use, so unlike the Avianca/AeroMexico partnership, you won’t need to remember which partners they have or outsmart the Smart Search but rather simply run award searches at AirCanada.com and let the tool surprise you with availability it finds. One technique I’ve mentioned before that I find particularly useful when searching for Aeroplan awards is that I search for one passenger to start. That’s because I’ll sometimes find situations where Air Canada puts together connections I wouldn’t have considered where one leg has enough seats for my family but another doesn’t. I’d rather start by searching for one seat because I can then drill down and search for legs separately to put together a different connection or perhaps a stopover to take advantage of the legs with enough availability. For a better explanation of the strategies I use to find business class availability for a family, see: Business class for 4 or more: finding multiple seats for family award travel.

Redeem Air Canada Aeroplan miles on Cathay Pacific flights on select routes

One specific Air Canada Aeroplan partnership that I wanted to call out individually is its partnership with Cathay Pacific. You can only redeem Aeroplan miles on a small handful of select Cathay Pacific routes (and vice versa), but it is a partnership that can make it far easier to put together an Aeroplan award to and from those cities included in the partnership. Aeroplan has tons of partners that serve Hong Kong, but these Cathay flights can be very useful for reaching various Southeast Asia destinations (which, in some cases, are not heavily served by Star Alliance airlines).

For more info on this partnership (including the list of qualifying routes), see this post at Prince of Travel.

Fly and ride: SNCF French Railways trains with Flying Blue miles

This is one that you certainly won’t miss if you’re searching via the Air France tool, but it’s worth being aware of because I expect it will continue to mean more connections to more destinations. Air France has a partnership with SNCF French Railways that makes it possible to book a ticket that includes air and train travel together. This means that, for example, I was able to book a ticket to Brussels (an airport that isn’t otherwise served by Air France) using Flying Blue miles for travel on Air France from New York to Paris and then a train to Brussels (as shown above).

Note though that (at least to my knowledge) you can not redeem miles for travel solely on trains. You’ll need to be booking an air-and-train combination. There is nothing special you need to do in terms of award search — the Flying Blue tool will find these itineraries when available.

Fly Air New Zealand with Virgin Atlantic miles

The talk of redeeming Virgin Atlantic miles is always almost exclusively about redeeming for Delta One to Europe or ANA first class to Japan, but I include this one in case some readers have plans to visit New Zealand thanks to the deal that we wrote about last year (Greg is there right now!).

Domestic flights within New Zealand can be pretty cheap with cash and when an award ticket makes more sense, they should be bookable or just 7,500 Turkish Miles & Smiles miles (since that’s the price of a Star Alliance domestic one-way through Turkish). However, if you’re not interested in dealing with Turkish, you can book domestic one-ways on Air New Zealand for 7,500 Virgin Atlantic miles each way (the chart above shows round trip pricing; one-way is half the cost of a round trip). Perhaps more interestingly, flights between New Zealand and Pacific islands or Australia are 10K each way in economy or 15K each way in business class. When I visited Niue a couple of years ago, which is only served by Air New Zealand and only twice a week, I used an Avianca LifeMiles manual booking to build a sort of complex itinerary to get there — but Virgin Atlantic miles can be another great way to travel routes like that one at just 10K miles in economy class. While it is nearly impossible to find Air New Zealand business class, I did recently see some seats between New Zealand and Asia — and at 40K each way in business class, Virgin Atlantic could possibly be a decent option.

Use Iberia Avios for LATAM flights

Since LATAM left oneworld a few years ago, you may have assumed that your only options for redeeming miles on LATAM were Delta or Alaska. However, a third option to keep in mind is Iberia Avios. Iberia won’t always be your best choice for booking LATAM, particularly on connecting itineraries like the example above, but it can come in handy in some instances. One nice thing is that the cancellation rules are the same as if you had booked an Iberia flight — in other words, you’ll pay just a 25 Euro cancellation fee per person and you can get your Avios redeposited.

Fly Virgin Atlantic with Hawaiian Miles

While Virgin Atlantic looks cool enough, I’ve never seriously considered flying them because of the high taxes and fees imposed on award tickets (whether booking through Virgin Atlantic or its other partners as far as I’d previously known). Then I stumbled on this gem: you can book round trip business class on Virgin Atlantic between the East Coast of the US and the UK for 125K Hawaiian Miles round trip — and according to Upgraded Points, the taxes and fees are less than $400 round trip. Here’s the award chart for using Hawaiian Miles on Virgin Atlantic:

Bottom line

Again, this post isn’t an exhaustive list of non-alliance partnerships, but rather some interesting ones that have caught my attention recently. There are plenty of others — like using Qantas for travel on El Al or Emirates for instance. It is almost impossible to remember them all — for me, this is the type of thing that makes an award search tool useful when I’m in the midst of planning a trip. And in 2023, I am very excited to be back to putting a lot more energy into finding these sweet spots and booking some sweet trips.

What are some of your favorite hidden alliances?

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