How We Book Flights With Points & Miles

Today, we’re walking you through our points and miles process for booking the most affordable business class flights.

Typically, it's good to figure out your flights first when booking a trip - especially when there’s transfer bonuses going on.

Then, you can plan hotels after that!

Our go-to tool to start this process is called Flight Connections (free to use), which locates positioning flight opportunities.

(This is especially important if you don’t live close to a major airport.)

Let’s pretend we're living in Cincinnati, Ohio for an example today.

Cincinnati (CVG) may not have a ton of international flights, but they do connect to many airports that do, like Chicago (ORD), Boston (BOS), DC (IAD), and New York (JFK or EWR).

Flight Connections shows this perfectly when we input “Cincinnati (CVG)” in the search field:

Next, we can take that list of positioning airports - and we can search with them in our next favorite tool Seats.Aero to find award availability.

The sample search below to Europe included all of the major airports within a roughly 2 hour flight from Cincinnati:

From here, flexibility is the name of the game!

Flexibility with:

Airport choice
Day of the week
Flight times
Destination

Obviously, your PTO schedules can be hard to work around - but try to avoid specific days when you begin this search process.

After searching, look through the results and filter by business class:

Lastly, if you find a good flight, you can click on that directly within Seats.Aero.

From there, you can get redirected to that specific airline to confirm that award availability actually exists.

Confirm availability every time with the airline before transferring credit card points and miles!

Try this out for yourself for some practice runs!

Tools like Flight Connections and Seats.Aero are a massive help, so we highly recommend them. 👍