Alitalia’s Awards, A Hidden Gem

I want to do a series on “Hidden Gem” redemptions and Alitalia seems like a good place to start. First of all, Alitalia is a 1:1 transfer from Amex MR points and Starwood. This may be one of the best American Express transfers for getting to Europe and a few other places, especially in business class. Take a look at this award chart yourself.

Um, awesome? Roundtrip to Peru for 35,000 miles. Roundtrip to Europe for 50,000 miles and 80,000 in Business.

There are many great finds on this award chart in general and you can view the entire chart here. Although their partners Etihad, Malay, Qantas and Jet all have different award charts which can be found here. You should really check the other award charts but they aren’t as strong as the SkyTeam chart.

One more added benefit of the program is one stopover with not so strict rules, just that your stopover can’t be longer than your destination and has to be “on the way”. It has some other routing rules about not back tracking to the same airport each direction but it’s pretty mild.

There are a few/restrictions problems with Alitalia:

1) All tickets are roundtrips only.

2) “The Multicarrier Award Ticket can be made up of a maximum of 6 flight legs.” 6 legs is two connections each way… not a lot.

3) Fuel surcharges.

I tend to be hesitant when writing about SkyTeam awards because I know almost nothing about SkyTeam. I have completely shunned Delta and do not care to earn/use Delta SkyPesos. So the first thing I did was create a SkyTeam chart of fuel surcharges according to ITA Matrix on each airline. This will at least let you know what to expect but not all redemptions that are supposed to pass on fuel surcharges line up with the YQ on ITA. So until someone tries to book a flight on each of these airlines using Alitalia Miles, we can’t know for sure which airlines do/don’t have fuel surcharges. Either way I have a chart and hopefully it’s good for something.

SkyTeam and Alitalia Parnter Fuel Surcharges (according to ITA)

In summary, add one stopover to any route. Go to South America for 35,000 miles and no fuel surcharges on AeroMexico. Go to the Middle East for 80,000 miles and no fuel surcharges on Saudia. Go to Egypt for 50,000 miles.

What even more incredible is that business class on route to India. 80,000 miles for economy and 100,000 miles to India. Totally worth 20,000 miles more.

Also read this, “Direct flights between Tahiti and Continental USA only by Air France: 60/90.” This is one of the cheapest redemptions for Tahiti around.

Anyways, just wanted to alert people to another Amex MR transfer option and SPG transfer option. Perhaps people don’t want to hear about the lesser known award charts and transfer options. Perhaps you do… Let me know! And btw, some of these lesser known award charts have more generous stopover rules.