Can You Actually Hack Airline Miles To Fly First Class For Free?

The idea of flying in luxury, indulging in fancy airline food, and sipping champagne out of a real glass was enticing, so naturally, I had to investigate.

I started by revisiting my own airline miles. I travel internationally for work all the time, booking my own flights, and have accumulated over a hundred thousand miles from actual flights, plus the extra miles from travel credit cards. You’d think with all that, I’d be a pro at redeeming miles, but I’ve never seen the kind of deals these travel influencers rave about. Clearly, I was missing the secret sauce.

Maybe I was doing it all wrong. Maybe there’s a way to move points around and maximize offers, like playing the stock market, except with airline miles. And here I was, just learning to be Jordan Belfort, shorting the airline market for cheap flights, without the slightest clue of the formula.

It all felt like some sort of airline mile market manipulation, but what if there’s a way to do it that I just wasn’t privy to? So, I turned to the best source I knew: my search engine. I dove headfirst into hacking YouTube channels and credit card websites, determined to find out if I’d been missing the key to airline mile hacking.

As I started my research, I stumbled upon a few key strategies to help maximize airline mile hacking. Let's dive into them.

Know How To Manipulate Travel Points to Your Advantage

Travel points are the currency you earn and use to purchase travel-related expenses like flights, hotels, and rental cars. You can rack them up through loyalty programs every time you fly or stay somewhere, or by spending on credit cards, especially travel credit cards.

The trick is to take a good look at your airline and credit card miles to see where they’re worth the most, because not all points are created equal. Different airlines and credit cards will value your points differently. Some credit cards will also have better sign-up bonuses to collect more travel points. 

NerdWallet sums it up pretty well with their handy comparison chart. For instance, one airline mile earned on Delta is worth about 1.2 cents, while a mile on Emirates Skywards is only worth 0.6 cents. So if you have 25,000 points, it’s worth $300 on Delta, but on Emirates Skywards, it's only worth $150. Big difference, right?

So, to get the most bang for your buck, you’ll want to transfer your miles to the airlines where they’re valued the highest. This usually involves using a point transfer feature on your card. You can also spend your airline miles with their partner airlines. For example, Korea Air is a partner with Delta, so if you’ve got Delta miles, you can use them on Korea Air. (If that’s still a bit confusing, this website offers a much more in-depth explanation of how to transfer points.)

But here’s the catch: Before you start transferring miles like you’re playing the stock market, you need to find the deals that make it worthwhile. And this is where things started to get tricky for me. Those elusive deals my favorite travel influencers kept bragging about were suddenly looking a lot harder to pin down.

You’ve Got To Have Flexibility

During my research, I discovered that the best time to book to find crazy deals is either 11 to 12 months in advance or within 14 days of your trip. Now, I can barely decide what I’m getting at the grocery store this week, so it looks like I’ll be booking closer to the actual day of my trip. So I was looking at flights two weeks from now to see if I could find a great deal. 

Which brings me to the next caveat. It seems like flight deals pop up randomly, making it tough to predict when the best deals will pop up. So it becomes crucial to have a flexible schedule and keep an eye on airline sites for sales. So, subscribing to and actually reading those airline reward program emails might just pay off.

This also means that you need to be flexible. Basically, don’t have your heart set on specific dates, destinations, or even departure airports. The key, I found, is to have a general idea of when and where you want to go before you start hunting for deals.

One website in my quest for cheap first-class tickets asked, “Do you have some wiggle room around your travel dates? Are you willing to drive a little further to an airport that’s not the closest to your home? Are you open to flying into an airport near your destination instead of directly to it?” If you want to find a good deal, your answer should be yes to at least one of these questions.

This means that if you’re really on the hunt for a deal, you have to let the wind, or tailwinds, take you wherever the sale breeze goes. 

My Results

With that attitude in mind, I started to browse different airline web pages for dates I may be free and to places I’d like to visit. It seems like, based on my research, this laissez faire way of going about my travels would get me the best flight deals, and the hotel and excursions could be filled in once I have my flight booked. 

While messing around on airline websites – not Google Flights – I found some surprisingly cheap round-trip tickets to Europe for around $700 for two weeks out and for $400 a few months out. But these were in the main cabin, not first class, like I had originally hoped. And those still required a hundred thousand points plus a few hundred dollars, which defeated my original goal of this exercise – to fly first class with just my airline miles. 

I guess the search will continue, but it’s safe to say that unless you’re being paid to make these videos or have a secret airline fairy godmother granting you crazy deals, finding these deals is pretty difficult. However, you can at least know if you’re getting a good deal and how to transfer points to maximize your value. I am more confident that I can book economy seats for just my airline miles by moving my travel points around. Just don’t expect to fly in luxury for free.