For the purpose of this article, I'll look at destinations in sub-Saharan Africa, even though
some airlines charge fewer miles for awards to northern African countries like Egypt and Morocco.
Not exact matches
The United TravelBank Card is one of the
few airlines credit cards that doesn't
charge an annual fee.
Those
airlines typically
charge anything from a
few dollars for short - haul flights up to $ 27 for a transcontinental flight, according to Steve Nolan, a spokesman for Gogo.
Also,
airlines often
charge a fee for booking tickets last - minute, so you'll want to plan ahead by at least a
few weeks whenever possible.
Another hidden gem of the Avios program is that British Airways is one of the
few airlines that allows pooling of miles between family members at the same address with no
charges for sharing or gifting points.
We flew to France recently, for a special vacation. The best priced flights I could find were on British Airways, leaving from Cancun. European
airlines aren» t currently flying directly to Belize City. They supposedly will fly directly to Belize within a
few years. The cost of our bus tickets were an extra $ 30 when
charged in Belize. The last time I traveled they were about $ 22 when purchased at the bus terminal in Chetumal.
Here's one example where Alaska
Airlines Mileage Plan is
charging both lower fees and
fewer miles to fly on American instead of British Airways.
Although Emirates has very
few partners, there are two programs that give us access to Emirates award seats and do not
charge fuel surcharges: Alaska
Airlines and Japan
Airlines.
Also note that US Airways is one of the
few airlines to
charge an «award processing fee» — regardless of when you make the reservation — of $ 25 for domestic flights and $ 50 for flights to Hawaii and Europe.
If there was any correlation to the price of fuel we would have seen wholesale and significant decreases in these
charges over the past 18 months and that simply hasn't happened (although a
few airlines, like Qantas, have made some reductions).
The American
Airlines card's relatively low annual fee of $ 50 (first year waived) also means
fewer airline perks than those offered by cards that
charge more.
Airlines like to price gouge desperate travelers by
charging 5 - 10 times what the same seat sold for a
few months earlier.
Most of the rest of the Membership Rewards
airline partners (such as Air France, ANA, Aeroplan)
charge stupid fuel surcharges on most of their flights, which makes them mostly useless for those of us who are so cheap that we don't even want to pay a
few hundred dollars for a premium redemption.
There are a
few airlines that
charge a nominal fee for your boardbag, I don't mind paying that... free is better but nominal is almost as good.
But within the last
few years, the
airlines increased the fees they
charge while revising their award charts to require more miles.
British Airways British Airways is one of the
few airlines that
charges the lap infant award fee (10 %) in miles instead of dollars.
Not only do some
airlines charge a large number of miles for tickets, most make very
few seats actually available.
However, unlike the other
airlines that
charge 25k for all intra-US flights, using Avios to book AA and soon to be US Airways flights that are less than 2,000 miles (one - way) in actual distance are only 20,000 Avios Round - trip or
fewer for rewards tickets.
Comparatively, British
Airlines will
charge you as
few as 4,500 Executive Club Avios miles for flights under 650 miles and up to 10,000 miles for flights up to 2,000 miles.