A Guide to Earning Miles with Star Alliance Partners (and credit chart)

When you pay for a flight, you earn miles towards an airline’s mileage program. However, what you may not know is that you have a choice of which mileage program to earn miles with. Now, obviously you can’t choose just anyone’s mileage program, but you can choose any program that partners with that airline, either as a code-share or via the alliance partnership.

To earn with someone other than the airline you’re flying, you must provide your frequent flyer membership number. For instance if you are flying with Lufthansa but want to earn with United, simply provide your United membership number upon booking.  Or if you don’t get a chance to do this at the time of booking, do so when you check into your flight.

When you book a flight you likely choose by price. What you may not know is that you are essentially choosing a class distinction. Some of the class distinctions you may already be familiar with, like business class vs. first class.

In reality however, each flight has a fare basis code that distinguishes what kinds of restrictions and policies go with that rate. For instance when you choose a first class ticket, you are likely choosing a flight coded as an “F” class. This code is programmed with the first class allowances like free cancellations, extra bags, etc. Different airlines may program these codes slightly differently, based on their policies. And each airline may have more distinctions than you realized. For instance rather than just economy, business and first, they may have discount economy, regular economy, full-fare economy, etc etc. And each division has a code that distinguishes what rules and policies to attach to the ticket.

When you are purchasing your ticket online, you can generally click on the flight number and see a few extra details about it. For instance you can see what kind of plane you’ll be on as well as what the fare class of your flight is.

Here is a screenshot of the information provided in the search results on United.com’s website for example. Notice that the class of the ticket also shows a letter in parentheses. That is the fare code or fare basis code. Notice that there are two different codes, both under the title “economy”. This means that in reality there are at least two versions of “economy” for this flight.

In other cases, you have to search a bit for the information. For instance for Expedia flights you must click “Show flight details”.

When booking on Hipmunk, you will have to go through your entire booking until it brings you to the site where the booking will actually be taking place. At this point there should be an option to show more complete flight details. This will generally be the case for most bookings, even if you have to hunt for it.

Most all flights for leisure travel are discount economy. It’s the lowest rate. Economy is the class and discount economy refers to the class code. It’s strict. It’s cheap.

This is an important thing to note because some airlines give 0% miles for their partner’s discount economy flights.

Often the economy class codes differ but in general if I see a “K”, I know it’s discount economy and if I see a “J”, I know it’s business. However, there are always exceptions. I’ve seen the class code “A” as discount economy, premium economy, or even first.

Therefore, if you find you’re class code, you may still want to check the earning rules for each airline. Just google something like, “earning [name of airline] miles on partner flights” and you should find the rules for each class code.

Charts

Discount Economy

Economy (including Full Fare and Premium Economy)

Business Class

First Class

Conclusion