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A positioning flight (as it relates to an award booking) is a flight that a customer purchases separately from the award reservation in order to depart or arrive at an airport near to one’s home city, but not at the usual or preferential airport. Positioning flights exist in order to get an aircraft to a destination for maintenance or otherwise, and tend not to be for revenue purposes. You can use that to your advantage. The most obvious reason to use positioning flights is when there is no availability to depart to or arrive from your regular airport, but there is availability to fly from an airport that is easily accessible from your home city (for instance, Oakland instead of San Francisco, or Newark instead of New York).
The less obvious reasons to purchase a positioning flight could be to upgrade your travel experience or save you a lot of money. For example: perhaps there is availability from your home city to your destination, but in a cabin that is significantly inferior to that which is preferred. Check the availability of seats in a better airline class for an airport adjacent to your home city.
Let’s say you live in Boston and want to fly to Frankfurt in business class using Chase Ultimate Rewards (UR) points. Even if there is business class award availability on the non-stop BOS-FRA Lufthansa flight (for which you would have to transfer 70,000 Chase UR to United), it might be better to fly to FRA from JFK in New York City on the Singapore Airlines Suites (for which you would have to transfer 58,000 UR points to Singapore Airlines). Not only would you be flying in a cabin that is substantially nicer, but you would save 12,000 UR points (note: surcharges, taxes, and fees would be about $200 more per person). Those 12,000 UR points saved could cover your flight from BOS to JFK, as an economy seat is only 4,500 BA Avios points (depending on availability). Depending on how much you value Chase UR points, those could actually make up or cover most of what you would have to pay in additional surcharges, taxes, and fees.
The other instance in which it makes sense to purchase a positioning flight is even less obvious. Let me demonstrate using a real-life example:
Last week I was working on an award booking request for a family of four that wanted to fly in economy class from Los Angeles to Athens, Greece using American Express Membership Rewards points. There was availability from LAX to ATH within their preferred outbound dates for which we could use Aeroplan miles. The problem was that the only options available from LAX required both flights to be on Air Canada, and Aeroplan imposes fuel surcharges on their own flights.
With fuel surcharges totaling over $1,000 for all four passengers, this no longer seemed like the ideal option. However, there was economy class availability to ATH from San Francisco via Istanbul on Turkish Airlines, an airline on which Aeroplan does not impose fuel surcharges.
Flights from LAX to SFO were selling for $84 (a total of $336 for the family of four) on our client’s preferred outbound date. Therefore, even in purchasing four such tickets, they would still be saving over $650 when compared to the option available from their home airport. Not a bad deal considering they would only need to take an extra one-hour flight! Plus, I would much rather fly Turkish Airlines from SFO to ATH via Istanbul than Air Canada from LAX to ATH via Toronto. If there had been availability on one of the American Airlines or US Air LAX-SFO flights, the family could have instead used a total of 18,000 BA Avios instead of spending $336 for an even better deal. Unfortunately, there was no such availability.
When booking awards it is always important to think outside the box in order to make sure you are considering all options that might improve your travel experience or save significant amounts of money.
Have you scored a great deal using positioning flights? Leave your stories and tips in the comments!
If you need assistance with an award booking, please consider PMM Travel Consulting’s award booking service. Clickhere to get started.
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