Great JP miles redemption options you can no longer book

In the past, I've tried to wax eloquent about the relative merits of booking partner awards using JP miles. They had some fantastic options including on carriers like Cathay Pacific and Etihad, for a relatively low mileage requirement. However, a few months back, Jet Airways revised (upwards, I might add) most, if not all, of its partner awards. And although they've been very transparent about the change, some of the unbelievable redemption options of the past no longer exist. So we thought we'd reminisce about those for a bit, and also cover one important aspect of reporting deals, in this post.

Identifying the best redemption value

To know if you're getting good value for the miles you're redeeming, you need to know the redemption value (or as I like to call it, the burn-to-earn ratio). Using a tool like the Great Circle Mapper, it is possible to identify the distance between two points (airports) on a map, and then compare that with the mileage required to fly between those two points. So, one can then identify how many miles it takes to redeem, per mile of flight - the burn-to-earn ratio. Naturally, the higher this ratio, the better.

For instance, typically, a route like BOM-LHR used to cost 27,000 JP miles, for a flown distance of 4,469 miles. That's a burn-to-earn ratio of 0.166 miles redeemed per mile of flying. So if you got a ratio higher than that, great!

This continues to be a great yardstick for me personally to determine which sectors provide me the best value for the miles I'm redeeming.

Intra-US routes

One such option was the intra-US segments that were available for 5,000 JP miles for a round trip in economy class. That's a paltry 2,500 miles each way, which was an extremely low requirement. These were basically for flights within the following 4 sets of geographical areas:

• south-east US+Caribbean, 
• south-west US+Mexico,
• north-west US+Canada, and
• north-east US+Canada

Here are the cities that these zones covered:

Here's an example, flying from DFW to LAX:

This route works out to 1,235 miles each way, and required 2,500 miles for a one-way ticket. That translates into a burn-to-earn ratio of 0.494, which is actually pretty good!

However, that's not the best redemption option that was available.

Partner airlines versus redemption on Jet's own metal

Because of whatever twisted logic was being applied at the time, there were huge discrepancies between redeeming JP miles for partner awards, versus redeeming them on Jet's own flights. For instance, MAA-BOM-LHR and back would cost 37,500 miles one way, or 75,000 miles for a round trip, for an economy class award ticket on Jet Airways. This was because the route was priced as two segments - MAA-BOM at 10,500 and BOM-LHR at 27,000.

On the other hand, partner awards - going by Jet Airways' own published mileage requirements at the time - cost only 31,000 JP miles for an economy class round trip ticket! In effect, I could book a business class award ticket on a partner airline for about 15% fewer miles than an economy class round trip ticket on the same route! An exact routing (and travel class) compared between partner airlines and Jet's own flights could have a cost difference of nearly 60%!!!

Even so, the partner airline burn-to-earn ratio works out to 0.33. Though lower than some of the intra-US routes, these are longer routes, which needs to be a qualitative consideration when making the comparison. And it was certainly better than flying Jet Airways' own aircraft, which would have a burn-to-earn ratio of 0.136.

But still, that wasn't the best ever partner redemption using JP miles

The biggest quirk of Jet Airways' partner awards came from the grouping of zones in its partner awards chart. At first, the chart seemed extremely detailed - they classified destinations into 23 zones, specified cities in each zone, and identified mileage requirements for each pair of zones, where flights were possible. The partner awards chart alone took 3 full pages of their awards brochure!

But in all that detail, they seemed to have missed out on the fact that Africa is a pretty large continent. And it also seems they gave the responsibility of assigning zones, to someone who didn't score too well on their geography tests!

So let's look at this particular exception. Casablanca (CMN) in Morocco fell in Zone 11 of Jet's partner award chart, and Seychelles (SEZ) and Mauritius (MRU) fell in Zone 10.

CMN to SEZ stacks up at 5,842 miles one way (or 11,684 miles for a round trip), and CMN to MRU at 6,929 miles one way (13,858 miles round trip) in terms of miles flown.

As per the charts, these required the following miles for an award ticket:

That's right - 17,500 miles for a round trip economy class ticket. Or a burn-to-earn ratio of 0.668, when flying CMN-SEZ round trip, or 0.791 on CMN-MRU round trip! Isn't that spectacular?

The icing on the cake is that both routes (to SEZ and MRU) from CMN had connections in DXB, since the partner airline on these routes was Emirates. I cannot imagine anything better than flying Emirates Business class for 35,000 JP miles, on CMN-MRU !!! Admittedly, it is a bit convoluted, and there were (a) some taxes and fees, as also (b) positioning costs to CMN or MRU to be paid, but that could be easily managed.

Why did we not write about this earlier? 

Now on to the second part of the objective of this post. Why did we not write about this earlier?

There is always a conflict between publicly writing about a fantastic deal (and have the airline take it down, as a consequence), or let it remain unspoken and share the information with others using channels that don't invite the airline's attention.

We chose the latter. We didn't want to kill a good deal. Quite a few people that we know, whom we shared this option with, didn't end up taking these flights, so we figured that if those people represented the wider population, chances of the deal being killed were higher than it being used, had we chosen to write about this.

Readers' views: What do you think of the above routes? Did you have any "gems" in terms of high-value routes that you'd like to share? And what do you think about the conflict between publishing deals and keeping quiet?