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What is The Amex Travel Portal
At the Lux Points Academy our primary objective is to help you maximize your points and miles for the best redemption rates. It is less effective to utilize your credit card rewards program’s travel portal for mile redemptions, as the true value comes from transferring your miles to partner airlines for flights.
The Amex travel portal, part of the travel sector of American Express, enables you to use your American Express points to book flights and hotels instead of using cash. This feature is appealing because American Express allows you to redeem miles for most flights, essentially letting you “pay with points” instead of with cash. This translates to a value of 1 cent per mile for your miles. This means that for every $1,000 worth of travel expenses, you would need 100,000 points.
When you redeem via the airline programs themselves such as Air Canada, you are transferring your miles from American Express outbound to your airline frequent flyer program. We do this because you get much better mileage deals with lower award rates. The trade off is that it can be more difficult to find award availability since the flights available to be booked on points are up to the airlines, which control when they release the award seats.
One of the best parts of the Lux Points Academy is that we help you master the art of finding award availability by utilizing our system. We teach you the most available award routes between two regions of the world, including the precise timing and exact number of days in advance you should search each of these 1,000’s of routes worldwide.
This approach addresses a prevalent issue where individuals struggle to find available awards due to searching at the wrong time, when airlines have not released their seats. For instance, searching for a business class flight from SFO to SYD six months ahead may not yield results. We suggest focusing on award seats within 0-2 months beforehand for a higher chance of securing your preferred award seat.
What is Redemption Value
The way we evaluate a points flight deal is to look at the redemption value of a flight. Redemption value is the value you are receiving from your miles you use for your ticket.
The way we calculate redemption value is with the following formula
( Cash price of ticket – Taxes & Fees ) / # of points = X
We then take X and multiply it by 100 and that is your redemption value.
Redemption Value Example
Using the information on the images below, we can calculate the redemption value as follows:
($5,076 – $56) / 55,000 = .093
.093 x 100 = 9.3 cents/ mile
Redemption Value Goal
Our goal in redemption value is to get at least 4 cents per mile redemption value. This is easily attainable for international business and 1st class flights. Most times we like to get up to even 10 cents per mile redemption values on flights we book. We aim for these values of 4 -10 cents per mile redemption value since this allows us to maximize our miles even further and save us the most amount of money.
Bad Amex 1 Cent Redemption Value
Below you will see our same flight from SFO – PPT, meaning from the mainland USA to Bora Bora and the flight costs $5,076. If you want to use American Express points to book this flight it would cost 507,630 miles which is not a good use of miles.
The redemption value of your American Express Points here is only 1 cent per mile, which we do not want to do.
Good Redemption: Air Canada
For our SFO – PPT flight, a much better redemption is using Air Canada miles to book this flight which is operated by United Airlines. As you can see below this flight only costs 55,000 miles + $77 CAD.
Comparing the 2 options here, if you use American Express’s travel portal to book this flight on February 11 from SFO – PPT you would be using 507,630 miles vs only 55,000 miles on Air Canada. The difference is almost 10x the value. All you have to do to save about 450,000 miles is just transfer your American Express points to Air Canada.
Comparing Amex to Airline Transfer Partners
Here we just turned our 1 cent redemption into a 9.3 cent per mile redemption thus giving our miles more value. This means those same 507,630 Amex miles which were required for 1 person on a 1 way trip are the same as 9 tickets when using our strategy to maximize miles to book via Air Canada.
Bottom Line
We recommend not using credit card travel portals to book flights with points as you will be getting a subpar redemption value, typically around 1 cent per mile while you can easily get 4 -10 cents per mile redemptions when you transfer your American Express points to an airline’s frequent flyer program.
