Okay, so you have done the expense and collected reward points (or miles as Atlas prefers to call) in your kitty. How best can you utilize it? For the beginners, there are two ways of using the miles -
Most of the flight partners give lower value of 1 point except maybe KrisFlyer and ClubVistara (people can correct me here). My advice is to never convert your miles to airline points. It gives you a very poor return. Also, those airline points can only be used for your own travel as the points are tied to the airline ID.
The benefit is actually in transferring to a hotel and among all the hotel Accor works the best and IHG and Marriott Bonvoy are the worst. ClubITC give you a fair 1:1 value of points and room cost. So if you have 5000 miles, you'll get 10000 points when transferring to Club ITC and if you're trying to book a room worth 10k, you can use all of your points and book it. This ratio is 1:0.5 in IHG and Bonvoy, resulting in a very poor value. I have 10k points in IHG and I am looking forward to ways to utilize it better.
Accor give you 1:1.8 value on your points. So if you send 5k miles to accor, you'll get 10k points. And each point is equal to 1.8 rupee so you can use 10k points to book hotel room worth 18000.
So from all the analysis so far - ACCOR works best, followed by ITC. Rest all are worthless, resulting in Atlas points to be meaningless unless you want to use it for these two partners.
- Go to https://edgerewards.axisbank.co.in/lms/home and use your miles to get gift coupons. The reward rate typically is 5:1, meaning 5 points for 1 rupee of gift voucher. Some may be good, some bad, but it is never 1:1. This is also the portal to see all your RPs and see which transaction is giving you how much.
- Go to https://traveledge.axisbank.co.in/TE/home, where you'll go for your extra flight and hotel booking miles and use the points and miles transfer section to convert your miles to other hotel and flight chains. You can convert your miles to 1:2 here, meaning 1 mile is equal to 2 points for the respective hotel/flight. This is what we all end up doing.
Most of the flight partners give lower value of 1 point except maybe KrisFlyer and ClubVistara (people can correct me here). My advice is to never convert your miles to airline points. It gives you a very poor return. Also, those airline points can only be used for your own travel as the points are tied to the airline ID.
The benefit is actually in transferring to a hotel and among all the hotel Accor works the best and IHG and Marriott Bonvoy are the worst. ClubITC give you a fair 1:1 value of points and room cost. So if you have 5000 miles, you'll get 10000 points when transferring to Club ITC and if you're trying to book a room worth 10k, you can use all of your points and book it. This ratio is 1:0.5 in IHG and Bonvoy, resulting in a very poor value. I have 10k points in IHG and I am looking forward to ways to utilize it better.
Accor give you 1:1.8 value on your points. So if you send 5k miles to accor, you'll get 10k points. And each point is equal to 1.8 rupee so you can use 10k points to book hotel room worth 18000.
So from all the analysis so far - ACCOR works best, followed by ITC. Rest all are worthless, resulting in Atlas points to be meaningless unless you want to use it for these two partners.
