How to fly Business for the price of Economy

There are many ways to fly Business Class for "cheap", like redeeming frequent flyer miles, transferring points from credit cards, connecting through obscure airports and so on.

In this guide, I'll teach you one of the easiest ways: Buying points.

The basic idea

Everyone knows you can earn airline miles by flying a lot and then redeem them for free flights. But what if you don't fly enough to earn a substantial amount of miles?

Here's the secret: You can also buy airline miles. Usually, that's a bad deal because airlines sell them at a very high price. But when buying during promotional periods, you can get them for much cheaper.

A lot of programs regularly offer deals like "100% bonus miles" or "up to 90% off". This way, you can buy miles for roughly 1.2-1.5 cents each. This cost per mile, or CPM, is an important metric - it lets us compare how good different redemptions are across programs.

Get the best value

To make maximum use of these bought miles, you can also leverage the vast network of airline partnerships and alliances. For example, miles earned on Air Canada's Aeroplan program can be redeemed on many other Star Alliance carriers, often at better rates than using those airlines' direct programs.

How does it actually work?

Now, let's walk through a specific flight. Last year I was flying a lot between Seoul and Bangkok. There is a sweet spot for that route on Avianca LifeMiles: You can redeem Seoul (ICN) to Bangkok (BKK) for only 27,120 miles. If you subscribe to LifeMiles' Plus plan, you can get an additional 10% off, so it would cost 24,408 miles.

LifeMiles frequently sells points with a bonus of up to 170%. If you bought points during that sale, the cost per mile (CPM) would be 1.22¢. So this flight would cost 1.22¢ * 27,120 = $330 plus an additional $17.80 in tax.

Even buying points during a comparatively bad sale of 130% (1.43¢ CPM) comes to a total price of $400. That's almost 40% off compared to the normal cash fare of about $700.

This is what it looks like on LifeMiles:

Here is another example - a great redemption from the US to Japan:

Some things to consider

1. Buy for a specific flight with confirmed availability. Find the award seat first. If your dates don't have space, you don't want to be stuck with a pile of miles you can't use. And once you find it, book quickly — airlines devalue their miles all the time, often without any warning.
2. The miles are only part of the price. Every award still has taxes and fees. Some programs (like LifeMiles, Aeroplan, and Alaska Mileage Plan) keep them very low; others, like British Airways and Lufthansa, add fuel surcharges that can run into the hundreds. Always check the total redemption cost before you buy points.
3. Check the required minimum purchase to get the maximum bonus. Usually, you have to buy quite a lot of points to get there (e.g. at least 51,000 miles for LifeMiles' +130%).

The hard part, made simple

Even though you can save a lot on flights using these strategies, it's also a lot of manual work. You constantly have to check which bonuses are available and find the best routes to redeem with each program.

Doing all of that by hand is exhausting. That's exactly why we built Pointineer.

Pointineer watches 60+ loyalty programs and alerts you the moment a new bonus goes live, so you never miss one. We've also indexed the redemption prices of over 40,000 routes, so you can always find the cheapest program to book your flight.

Check it out!

Happy flying!
- Manuel