I live in Houston. A nice thing about living in Houston is the fact that it is a United hub and has hundreds of nonstop flights. I took a trip recently to El Salvador. While looking for award tickets, I knew that United charges 17,500 miles one way or 35,000 miles roundtrip to Central America.
I had known about ANA, but didn’t really know about its advantages until recently. What I learned is that if I book the same simple roundtrip using All Nippon Airways (ANA) miles, a star alliance partner, the price to El Salvador would be only 22,000 miles. That’s a savings of 13,000 hard earned miles.
ANA award chart is distance based, very similar to the Avios program.
A simple roundtrip from Houston
My flight to El Salvador roundtrip would be 2414 miles according to gcmap. As a result, it would take 22,000 ANA miles to book this simple roundtrip. The same trip would cost 35,000 United miles.
How about a shorter roundtrip
A roundtrip from Houston to Cancun is only 1622 miles. As a result, it would only cost 20,000 ANA miles as opposed to 35,000 United miles.
Possible destinations from Houston
If you look at the map below, you can see that all of Central America and Caribbean is fair game for 22,000 ANA miles or less. Even Canada is fair game, even though the savings there are only 3,000 miles since United charges 25,000 miles for a Canada trip. The inner circle represents roundtrips shorter than 2,000 miles and the outer circle represents roundtrips less than 4,000 miles
ANA allows 4 stopovers
United allows 1 stopover on an international destination. ANA allows 4 stopovers. Again, the ANA miles needed to book an award ticket depends on the distance traveled. That distance includes stopovers. So, flying from Houston, I could stop in Belize, then El Salvador, then Costa Rica, then Cancun, then back home to Houston. Distance traveled = 3247 miles. Cost to book award = 22,000 ANA miles.
Domestic options using stopovers?
From what I have read, I do believe you can use the stopovers domestically. For example, I can do Houston to Austin to Chicago to Miami then back to Houston. Cost = 22,000 ANA miles. Clearly, this doesn’t just apply to flights from Houston. You can do with from your home airport.
Why this works for me?
There are a few reasons why this works for me.
- I live in Houston
- Houston is a United hub
- There’s a ton of United nonstops
- Most Central American, Caribbean, or Canada roundtrips are under 4000 miles
- ANA does not charge fuel surcharges on United or Avianca or TACA.
There are a couple of posts which helped me discover this, which I think are very well written and deserve a thorough read:
- Travelisfree: A guide to ANA miles
- Milenomics: Using ANA in smaller cities
If you live in Houston or surrounding cities, then you should be using ANA miles to fly nonstop on United Airlines to see the Caribbean and Central America. You should not use United miles to book those awards as it’s a lot more expensive to do so.
Membership Rewards points transfer to ANA as do Starwood Points. I personally would transfer Membership Rewards as I pretty much use my Starwood points for hotel stays.
This is just my personal example. You can probably get creative and see what works for you. In addition, don’t discount the business class options. For example, 43,000 ANA miles for business class in all those segments mentioned above is pretty good in my opinion.