How to redeem rewards on airline "partners"?

Hi everyone,

I've tried to find the answer to this question, but either I'm not entering good search terms or it's just an obvious question and I'm overthinking it...

Anyway, the question is, if carrier A and carrier B are "partners", how do you redeem miles you've earned on carrier A for a flight on carrier B? For example, TPG recently posted on his blog about Amex MRs: Link

TPG explains that you can transfer MRs to Hawaiian and that seeing as Hawaiian is a partner with American, this means you can book flights with American. My question is: how? Do you just search for your itinerary on Hawaiian's website and the American flights show up? Do you have to call in to do this? Does it depend on the carrier?

Thanks, and sorry if this has been answered or if this is the wrong forum, I wasn't sure where to post it.

Yes. Some airlines show partner award flights online, but many do not. In those instances you must call the airline which operates the program to book. DO NOT TRANSFER POINTS TO ANY AIRLINE UNTIL YOU HAVE VERIFIED THAT AWARD SEATS ARE AVAILABLE FOR YOUR SPECIFIC DATES AND ROUTE. Availability of seats for purchase tells you nothing about award availability because award inventory is capacity controlled.

Start here:

http://www.hawaiianairlines.com/hawa...tner-airlines/

Thanks for the info! Is the best way to find these out just by looking at the websites or have you seen a chart that has all the airlines? Is there a consensus on which airline(s) or alliance(s) are the best for partner awards?

Wirelessly posted (BlackBerry: BlackBerry8530/5.0.0.601 Profile/MIDP-2.1 Configuration/CLDC-1.1 VendorID/417)

"Is there a consensus on which airline(s) or alliance(s) are the best for partner awards?"

There's no one "best" program for all situations. A lot depends on what city pairs you are looking to redeem your miles for, at what time of year, for how many people, and in what class of service. There's also the complicating factor of surcharges, which some programs charge when redeeming on some airlines.

The three big alliances are Star Alliance (United, US Air, Lufthansa, ANA, et al), oneworld (AA, BA, Iberia, Cathay Pacific, Qantas, et al), and Skyteam (Delta, Air France, KLM, Korean Air, et al). In general, *A has best availability, but it all depends on where you want to go, time of year, etc. For *A, ANA website is the most accurate and exhaustive, but is horribly user unfriendly. United is user friendly, includes all *A airlines, and correct 99% of the time. For oneworld, it's not so straightforward. BA is good but will route you on BA if at all possible (high surcharges). AA is very good but doesn't show Iberia or Cathay availability. Qantas shows all airlines, but not always all availability. I prefer to use AA if I'm not trying to book on IB or CX. For IB I use Iberia and for CX I use Qantas. Unfortunately I don't know much about Skyteam.