Rewards for buying airline tickets

  Airfare Booking Strategies

The prices for airline tickets are controlled by the central reservation system. While you can certainly uncover less expensive flight options to your destination, airline tickets for any given flight usually cost the same amount of money on every website. However, there are various ways that you can extra rewards on your purchase.

Jump to

• The best credit card rewards
• When to use the airline's own credit card
• Frequent flyer miles
• Travel site reward programs
• Online shopping portals
• Discounted gift cards

Using the right credit card

The simplest way to get extra rewards for your airfare purchases is by using a credit card that earns bonus rewards for airline purchases. The best reward rates on airfare purchases are from the following cards. Best Credit Cards for Travel Spending.

Citi Prestige Guide	The Citi Prestige Card. Each earns 5x ThankYou Rewards, worth 7.5 cents per dollar, on airfare purchases. You can book directly with the airline, and you'll get top-notch travel insurance benefits. If you can justify the annual fee for its high rewards on airfare and restaurants and its unique 4th night free benefit, this is the best card to use to purchase airfare.
Amex Platinum Card Guide	Amex Platinum Card. You earn 5x Membership Reward points, worth 7.5 cents per dollar. With the personal version of the card, you need to buy the tickets directly from the airline or via Amex Travel. With the business version of the card, Amex Travel is your only option.  These cards have a high annual fee, and aren’t for everyone. In addition, you won’t get free trip cancellation and interruption, trip delay, and baggage delay insurance that you would get from using some other credit cards.
Sapphire Reserve Guide	Chase Sapphire Reserve. Earns 3x Ultimate Rewards points, worth 5.1 cents per dollar, on airfare purchases. You can purchase from the airline, through Chase, or from a 3rd party booking site like Orbitz.  for spending on restaurants on other types of travel expenses. And you’ll get built-in travel insurance protections. With an effective annual fee of $150, and several other nice benefits, this is an essential card for many travelers. You can stick to this card for airfare if you want to keep things simpler. You can also earn the same reward rate from the Ink Preferred Card (business).
Amtrak Credit Card Guide	Amtrak World Master Card. Earns 2x Amtrak points, worth 5.8 cents on train travel, per dollar spent on airfare purchases. Of course, you need to have good opportunities to redeem your points for Amtrak travel.
Amex Gold Card Guide	The Amex Gold Card. Earns 3x Membership Reward points, worth 4.5 cents per dollar, on airfare purchased directly from the airline. We prefer using one of the cards above, if we have one. But, if you don't, and you feel you can get good value from the Gold card's bonus reward rates on Restaurants and Supermarkets, this is a good card to use for your airline purchases.
Altitude Reserve Guide	Altitude Reserve. Earns 3x Altitude Points, worth a flat 4.5 cents per dollar, when used to purchase airfare.

When to use the airline's own credit card

When you are buying airline tickets, you can sometimes earn a higher rate of rewards if you use the airline’s own credit card. We wouldn’t recommend going out and getting one of these cards, just for the higher reward rate. But, if you have it for other reasons, such as the free checked bag benefit, you can use it for your airfare purchases (from the that airline) as well. Just be sure that you are likely to be able to easily use the points you earn. You are better off earning lower rewards in an account that you are likely going to use, than just adding some extra miles to an account where they will sit around, or wind up expiring.

• The JetBlue Plus Credit Card card is your best option for JetBlue flights. The JetBlue Plus and Business cards earn 6x JetBlue miles per dollar, which is better for many people (and most likely JetBlue cardholders) than even the 5x Membership Rewards from the Amex Platinum card.
• The Alaska Airlines Credit Card, Asiana Credit Card, and the Aviator Silver Card can be better options, for fans of those specific frequent flyer programs. They each earn 3x miles on purchases directly with the corresponding airline. Normally, 3x miles with any specific frequent flyer program isn’t as valuable as the 3x Ultimate Reward, Membership Rewards, or ThankYou points that can be used with many different programs. But, if you went out of your way to get these credit cards, chances are that you highly value points in these specific programs. Since points in these three programs can be hard to get via other means, you may prefer to earn their miles on your airline purchases, instead of more flexible credit card points, that you can only use on other airlines.
• The Virgin Atlantic Credit Card, Avianca Vuela Card, Air France KLM Credit Card, and British Airways Credit Card also earn 3x miles, but are not as good as the best travel rewards credit cards. You are better off earning 3x Ultimate Reward, Membership Reward, or ThankYou points that you can transfer to these programs, as well as to many others.
• It doesn’t make sense to use other airline cards. The United Airlines, American Airlines, Delta, Southwest, Frontier, Hawaiian Airlines, Korean Airlines, AeroMexico, Cathay Pacific, and Lufthansa credit cards all earn 2x miles when you purchase directly from that airline. That is a lower reward rate than what you’d get from any of the travel reward cards listed above. Allegiant offers 3x points per dollar, but those points are only worth 1 cent each, making it a poor deal.

Earning frequent flyer miles

Of course, frequent flyer miles are the classic way to earn rewards from your airplane tickets. Almost every airline lets you earn miles for your purchases.

When you fly on an airline, you can choose any of that airline’s partners to earn miles with, rather than the airline itself. This comes in very handy, allowing you to consolidate your miles in just a few programs, rather than earning a smaller number of points, spread out across a larger number of programs. Earn Miles for Every Flight (In as Few Accounts as Possible)

Earning additional rewards with a travel site reward program

When you book your flights on a 3^rd party travel site, like Orbitz, you can earn rewards from that travel site, along with the frequent flyer miles from the airline, and the points from your credit card.

• Orbitz. Orbitz has the best reward program for airfare (for hotels, we like hotels.com better). You get 1% back in rewards when you buy airfare, and 2% back when you buy through their app. Not earth-shattering, but better than what you get from the other programs. Be aware that you need to use your points to book pre-paid hotel stays on Orbitz, and they expire after one year (regardless of account activity). That makes them a little bit of a pain to redeem. But, most people should have natural opportunities to use up all the points they earn.

• Expedia. With Expedia, you only earn 1 point for every $5 of airfare spending. In addition, they are normally only worth .7 cents each when you use them to book hotels. That works out to .14% back. However, you get double the value when you use them for “VIP” hotels, which is comparable to the limited set of hotels where you can redeem Orbucks. This raises the reward rate to .28%.

Adding even more rewards with online shopping portals

Online shopping portals are a straightforward way to earn cash-back, or travel rewards, on most of your online purchases. Rather than going directly to an online store, you go to the shopping portal first. Then, you click on a link to visit the store where you want to shop. Because the shopping portal “sent you” to the store, the receive a commission on everything you buy. And they refund part of this commission, back to you.

• It is a bit of a pain to remember to use the shopping portal. But, if you don’t take advantage of one, you are leaving money on the table.

Since the margins on airfare are so low, the reward rates from different shopping portals aren’t very high. Many travel booking sites don’t even bother participating, and almost no airline does. However, it is always worthwhile to check. The easiest thing to do is to go to Cashback Monitor or Cashbackholic, enter the name of the airline or travel site, and see what you can get.


• Be careful when looking at the reward rates for general-purpose travel sites. You’ll typically see a high number (like 12%). That represents the rate for more lucrative categories of purchases, such as cruises. The rate you’ll get on airfare purchases is much less, often just a fixed amount per purchase, and can be seen in the fine print on the online shopping portal’s webpage.

Here is a chart of reward rates on airfare purchases from some of the best shopping portals from May 2017. These are likely to be out-of-date, but they give you an idea of what to expect.

	Flights		Packages
	Be Frugal	TopCashback	Be Frugal	TopCashback
Expedia	$2.50	$2.50	4%	4%
Orbitz	-	$3.00	-	4%
Travelocity	$3.86	$3.00	4%	4.5%
Priceline	1%	$5.00	5%	5%
CheapOair	$9	$9	$26	$26

• Cash-back rates are much higher, when you are buying a vacation package. They can give you a nice additional discount. For example, if two people are purchasing $600 airline tickets, the difference between a package and an airfare purchase is over $40 in cash back.
• If you are using a shopping portal, and you really want to optimize your savings, you are usually best off splitting your flights into multiple purchases. Fixed dollar reward rates are by reservation, not by ticket. If you book a single reservation for a family of 4, you would get $3 back from Orbitz (on top of your other rewards). If you book a separate reservation for each person, you would get $12 back instead. It might be worthwhile to split up a round trip into two separate purchases, to get the extra $3/person. But, if the flights are expensive enough, it is worthwhile to stick with a round trip reservation to avoid the possibility of having to pay two separate cancellation fees. If you need to cancel inexpensive tickets, they are going to be worthless anyway, so you might as well earn the extra rewards.

Using discounted gift cards

Rather than paying with cash, you can pay for your airplane tickets with airline or travel site gift cards, that you are able to purchase for less than face value.

You can use Gift Card Wiki to find gift cards that are available at small discounts, and can be redeemed electronically.  Expect to save around 3-5% off with airline gift cards. Avoid buying cards on eBay. Get them on sites like Raise and GiftCardZen, which provide guarantees that the card will work. When you buy online, you’ll typically get an “E-Gift” card, which is just a number you enter, when you are making your purchase. This is far more convenient than waiting to receive a physical gift card in the mail.

When you use gift cards, you won’t earn credit card points on the airfare purchase, and you might not earn travel site reward points. However, you will usually earn credit card points from buying the gift cards instead. In most cases, the reward rate on the gift card purchases will be lower than the rate you can earn on the airfare purchases. If so, you’ll need to make sure that the gift card discount more than covers the lost reward points. 

Best Credit Cards for Travel Spending

Earn Miles for Every Flight (In as Few Accounts as Possible)

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