Miles and Points Travel

How to save miles and cash

We talked about it on the podcast, but I’ll try to break it down even more. A positioning flight is used to get you from the closest airport to your home base, to the main airport that offers you the lowest mileage to your destination.

Let’s say you want to fly to Japan. You start to research flights, and you see the best deal, in Business Class, is from LA to Tokyo. It’s only 60,000 miles each way! (If you signed up for the Chase Ink 120,000 point sign up bonus, you could fly round trip for free!) Anyway, back to the example.

The issue is that you live in Manchester, New Hampshire! You need a flight to LA. So you grab a flight for $150 to get you to LA. THAT is a positioning flight!

These flights are important when it comes to miles and points. In this hobby, not everything will line up perfectly when trying to book travel. I had a similar situation last year. I wanted to fly SingaporeAir to try their highly touted Business product. However, they only fly from JFK to Frankfurt. I was heading to Germany, so that worked. But I do not live in NYC. So I booked a cheap flight from my home airport to JFK. I spent the night, so as to avoid any stress with delayed or cancelled flights. My positioning flight could have also been booked with miles, but at the time, Delta was running an amazing fare that allowed travel in First Class for the price of Coach! I couldn’t pass that up.

As you can see, positioning flights can save you a ton of miles. So when it comes time to book your flights, and you can’t find what you want from the closest airport to you, start branching out. Use Google Flights to find the airlines that fly to your destination from some of the major US cities. If you’re on the East Coast, try BOS, NYC area, ORD, IAD/DCA and even MIA. West Coast can find great options from LAX, SFO, LAS, and sometimes PHX.

So if you open your options and city pairs, you may be able to save big on the miles you need for that next trip!