Help with Frequent Flyer Decisions
 

Hi Everyone,

I hope that this is the right place to post this at. If not, if a mod would please be so kind to point me towards the right forum that would be appreciated.

I am a small business owner who books around 100 flights for his employees per year. I have next to zero experience with frequent flyer programs and have been doing research today on what would be my best decision.

My employees currently don't do anything with frequent flyer miles, and see them as potentially a good way to help the company save some cost. My first question would be: Is it possible for a business to get a company frequent flyer program without distributing all of it to everyone's individual cards? The closest I have come to finding something about this is a page by star alliance https://www.partnerplusbenefit.com/a...aramCountry=NL. Unfortunately little to no info is displayed here and my limited understanding of frequent flyer miles certainly doesn't help grasping what this is about.

Assuming it is not possible to do something with a single company card I am anticipating having to register cards for all the employees and just collecting frequent flyer miles separately. Given this, I am looking for some advice on which frequent flyer program to use. A friend of mine believes as a default US Airways offers the best program. However, we fly a lot with United/Continental. We always book economy and http://www.united.com/CMS/en-US/Mark...es/united.aspx this link seems to state that booking economy won't get you anything extra. In our case is it best to get a card with US Airways under Star Alliance?

Here are some stats on the flights that we have booked in the past. One point accounts for one return flight. For long distance we flew with Star Alliance ~42 returns, Sky Team ~13, One World ~9 returns. Short distance we flew ~23 returns with Star Alliance, Sky Team ~10 returns, and One World ~6.

Long distance

United/Continental (27,33)
KLM (8)
US Airways (5,5)
Delta (5)
Turkish (5)
British (3,5)
Lufthansa (3)
Finnair (2)
American Airlines (1,83)
Korean Air (1,5)
SAS (0,83)
Leftover Baltic, Asiana, Virgin, Emirates, Berlin (5)

Short Distance

SAS (10)
Lufthansa (6)
KLM (5)
Delta (4,5)
US Airways (4,5)
American Airlines (3,5)
Norwegian (3)
United (2,5)
Finnair (2)
Leftover China Southern, Blue1, Polish, Southwest, Frontier, Spirit, Airtran, Jetblue, Virgin, Brussels, Ryanair (12,5)

Given how many different airlines we use to find the cheapest flights I'm also looking for some advice on whether or not it is a good idea to just book everything with for example Star Alliance and only get an airmiles card there, instead of booking things all over the place and collecting points everywhere.

TL;DR

1. Is it possible for a business to get a company frequent flyer program card?
2. Whos Frequent Flyer program would be good for us?
3. Is it better to keep booking the cheapest flights and use multiple programs, or is it beneficial to stick with one?

Any help is appreciated thanks!

The airlines are pretty firm about the fact that points go into the employee's accounts and not the employer's. They have obvious business reasons for wanting to do this. (First, it causes individual employees to favor their airline even when it's not cheapest; second individual employees are less likely to redeem the points at all or to redeem them optimally.)

Some carriers have programs oriented toward the company also; for example Delta has the "Skybonus" program.

How do you know your employees don't do anything with their miles?

And is it really worth it to you to book all these flights yourself (as you seem to do) rather than outsourcing to a travel agency? Well, that's your decision.

First of all, make sure all of your employees sign up for any programs for the airlines the fly on regularly. Aside from that, it doesn't appear you book enough flights on most airlines to get anything much of a bonus in terms of elite status or similar.

One thing, though, you can get as a bonus is from the carriers' business programs. I don't know about UA/Delta, but here's a link for American.

https://www.businessextraa.com/index.jsp

Signing up for that WILL consolidate all of your Business Extra points for your employees into your hands. I would expect the other carriers have something similar.

How about the Chase Ink Bold? You get one main card and then employee cards. All of the spending goes into one account. The points can be transferred to travel partners such as United, Southwest and some hotel chains.

I use BusinessExtrAA even with only a small company. Have ~3 people signed up for it and in just over 2 years, including some nice bonuses, accumulated enough points for a system-wide upgrade. Better than not gaining anything for our travels. And, they even use the # on personal flights since it doesn't take anything away from them.

The most importamt factor is missing:

YOUR LOCATION

Ideally I'd be looking for an umbrella pass for all the points of the flights we book, but this sounds good as well. It seems like something like this does not count for flights booked with an alliance, but only with an airline. I'm looking into the options of such a program with United currently.

I still wonder if https://www.partnerplusbenefit.com/application/ is a similar program that may work for everything in the Star Alliance instead of just one airline, but information on this seems to be lacking (somehow the airlines included aren't even all the Star Alliance airlines, i.e. Turkish Airlines and others are missing). I'll shoot them an email as well for some info.

Something like that would be what I'm looking for with frequent flyer miles. Unfortunately the Chase Ink Bold is for expenses through Chase, and doesn't seem to be what I'm looking for here. They aren't mutually exclusive though, and we will be looking into the option of Chase Ink Bold as well, while maintaining our search for the most optimal situation for frequent flyer miles.

Excellent!

Our company is registered in The Netherlands but our employees live all over the world (Asia, US, Europe). Our flights are unrelated to The Netherlands, and are between Asia and the US, as well as Europe.