Frequent Flyer

A frequent flyer is a member of an airline loyalty programme, earning a balance for flying and spending that can be redeemed for flights and upgrades. The word covers both the person and, loosely, the programme itself, which is also called a frequent flier programme or an airline loyalty scheme.

The thing worth understanding first is that these programmes track two separate balances and people conflate them constantly. Miles or points are the currency you spend on rewards, and they can usually be earned without flying at all, through a co-branded credit card or a shopping portal. Status is the tier that determines how you are treated: lounge access, priority boarding, extra baggage, better seat selection. Status is earned almost entirely by flying, resets on a cycle, and cannot be bought with the currency. Spending your miles does not cost you status.

What a flight earns depends on the fare rather than the distance, which is where fare class comes in: a cheap ticket in a low class may earn a fraction of the miles of a flexible ticket on the same aircraft, or none. Many programmes now award miles on the amount spent rather than the distance flown, which changed who accumulates them and made long cheap flights much less rewarding than they used to be.

Alliances matter more than most travellers use. Membership generally lets you earn and spend across every airline in the alliance and take your status benefits with you, so credit is usually better consolidated into one programme than spread across three. It is also worth checking which programme prices a given redemption best, since partners often charge very different amounts for the identical seat.

The realistic view is that these programmes reward a particular pattern of travel: repeated flying, usually on one alliance, often paid for by someone else. For one or two leisure trips a year the miles rarely amount to much, and choosing a worse flight to protect a balance is the classic mistake. What is still worth doing is joining the programme of any airline you fly, since it costs nothing and the balance keeps; miles do expire, so check the rule.

Two practical cautions. Award availability is limited by bucket rather than by empty seats, so a half-empty cabin can still show nothing. And taxes, carrier charges and surcharges are payable on most redemptions, which occasionally makes an award seat cost more than a cheap paid one. See codeshare for why the operating airline decides what you actually get.