Award Chart Comparison of all mayor airlines - Google doc?
 

Does anyone know about or does anyone have (a updated) google doc with all the different award charts of the major airlines in comparison?

If not, I would like to start such a chart and maybe have the community contribute to it.

thanks

This would actually be a pretty good app if someone were to developer. There is currently an awardmapper.com site that tells you all the chain hotels and their points prices in a particular location.

Having the same functionality but for airlines, where you could choose a starting city and an ending city and show which airline program requires the fewest miles, would be really useful. Probably quite tough to implement though.

Welcome to Flyer Talk blnnik :)

While this would be useful it would also be very difficult to maintain. Frequent flyer programs change the redemption costs from time to time (not on the same dates as each other) and also the award rules. For some programs the redemption cost is per flight, which means routing is important (and options change as airlines add new routes or improve connectivity of flights, or vice versa), and for some the cost is linked to paid fares.

Thank you, Kiwi Flyer and Enigma368,

I know of such public charts that exist on google docs, that can be modified and maintained by multiple people. In any case, many of the airlines have some sort of award chart (with or without fuel charges) that can be compared. I think it would be useful to see who is charging how much for the different zones and compare the fuel-chargers under one another.

As above ffp's have been/are changing in recent times. The cost of real taxes & surcharges can be hard to find unless making a reservation.
http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/trave...demptions.html
http://www.awardace.com/

Doesn't BlondeBomber keep such a list? Maybe I'm too far into my bottle of Carmenere, but I think one of us old-timers has such a list.

Let's start with the main stumbling block:

Can you find a current Delta award chart anywhere?

Delta doesn't publish it, nor does it announce when/how it changes its award redemption tiers.

There are charts out there of what the Delta awards used to be, but I don't know of anyone able to (manually) keep it truly up to date, given Delta's unwillingness to make any such info public. It would seem to require a script that would search all of Delta's award inventory over all dates to all destinations and figure out how many different levels it found. And then constantly rerunning that script to see if anything had changed.

Hello sdsearch,
I understand that Delta doesn't have a public award chart anymore. My idea was rather to put the charts that are available in a format so that they can be compared directly next to each other. That way there is one spot one can easily compare award pricing. As far as I am concerned, there are major differences in term of the award ticket price, even on the same carrier and flight, booked through different channels.

Have you checked the Travel Tools forum? I'm pretty sure I've seen discussions of two or three tools that do what you want. Here is one example:

http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/trave...s-seconds.html

Great SanDiego1K,
I will look into AwardAce and see what it can offer. Thanks for your help!

This is slightly flawed since earning/burning ratios in different FFPs differ for each airline. To fly airline X might cost 10 points of A or 15 of B, yet the 15 B might be easier to earn and less valuable than the 10 of A.

Well, just how big is chart going to be?

Every carrier has different restrictions and different number of charts.

For example, many carriers have one chart for their own flights but another for partner flights. That means for a single chart you'd need an AA chart for redeeming on AA, an AA chart for redeeming on BA, a BA chart for redeeming on AA, an BA chart for redeeming on BA, then you'd need to factor in the peak and off-peak, and them being different (in terms of dates) for each such sub-chart.

And that is a big reason for the difference in pricing (on the same carrier and flight) between airlines; because one carrier might apply one of their 3 charts to carrier XX, and another carrier might apply a different one of their 3 charts to carrier XX, because of different relationship in that specific case.) AA has the comparatively simple case of either AA or partner. But some airlines might have 3 cases: that airline itself, its co-owned airlines, and it's non-owned partners.

Then there are the restrictions and their implications. If you abide by the restrictions on AAA-BBB, it's one award AAA-BBB. If you don't abide by the restrictions on AAA-BBB, it's one award AAA-XXX and a separate award XXX-BBB. (As an example, AA USA to Africa is one award only through Europe or Qatar's hub in Doha. Otherwise it's two awards, say if you use CX to connect in HKG.) How are you going to show all those clearly? (But if you don't show those in any way, won't it misleading?)

Oh, and that's even more complicated, because how it costs varies on how you earn it. For example, if you're using SPG, then UA costs "twice as much" as most other lines, because SPG->UA is 2:1, while SPG->most other airlines (including AA) is 1:1.

But if you have Chase Ultimate Rewards points aplenty too, then suddenly UA is 1:1 with those and not that expensive for you.

So in this example, UA doesn't have a fixed earn cost either, because it depends on how you earn it.

And so, once again, it can get very complicated, depending on how you earn each airline's miles/points (and if you earn in more than one way for a particular airline, then that's even more complex).

Indeed. There is a website which sort of does this (I can't remember the name), showing you all the award options between any city pair. It's fairly pointless, though, because chances are you already know what programs you're a member of, and it does nothing to help you understand what the 'better' choice is.

Thanks for the AwardAce tip. That's a pretty awesome tool. That would seem to do pretty much what the OP is suggesting. I like that it also shows each program's transfer partners.