Can someone explain airline points usage when booking one airline thru another?

Most major airlines belong to one of the world's three great airline alliances.

American Airlines belongs to Oneworld. Some other prominent airlines in Oneworld include Qatar, British Airways, JAL, Cathay Pacific, and Qantas.

United Airlines belongs to the Star Alliance. Other airlines in Star Alliance include Air Canada, Lufthansa, Turkish, Copa, ANA, EVA, Thai, and Air New Zealand.

Delta belongs to Skyteam. Other airlines in Skyteam include Korean, Air France, KLM, Aeroflot, Kenya, Alitalia, and China Airlines.

Airlines belong to these alliances so that they can cooperate to sell tickets. For example, if you want to fly from Baton Rouge to Queenstown, New Zealand, you can't do that all on one airline. The Star Alliance partnership allows United and Air New Zealand to interline so that you can buy one ticket that includes legs on both airlines.

Besides the partners in the alliances, some airlines have partners that are not in any alliance. Delta, for example, partners with Virgin Australia and WestJet to connect you places in Australia and Canada, respectively.

When you miles in an airline's frequent flier program, you can use those points to book flights on that airline's partners. So, you can use your Delta miles to fly on the Skyteam partners such as Korean and Alitalia, and also the non-alliance partners such as Virgin Atlantic.

Since you have Delta SkyMiles, you would use all of those through the Delta SkyMiles program and use them through the Delta website.

Where The Points Guy article is trying to help is if you have miles in multiple programs, or if you have points in a program that allows transfers to airline frequent flier programs. For example, you can transfer American Express Membership Rewards points, Chase Ultimate Rewards points, and Citi Thank You points into various airline programs.

Different programs have different rules and charts for how many miles it takes to fly to different destinations. So, if you have Chase Ultimate Rewards points and want to use them to fly on United Airlines to Hawaii, you would find that you could transfer them into Singapore Airlines program and (since Singapore is in the Star Alliance with United) book the flights for fewer miles than you could if you used United miles.

I hope this helps.

That does help and is consistent with what I've been reading online.

What has confused me about this, is if I were trying to book via Korean Air to Hawaii (since it appears they consider it part of the continental US, unless most airlines) and therefore have lower miles requirements, do I still do that on Delta's site, or do I do that on Korean's site, and then transfer or book with skymiles?

Okay, I got it. Thanks!

Not to thread hijack but...

Me n the misses got about 600k UR rewards and we want to go to Greece in a year. Is there a company or someone I could pay to find the best deal for 1st class\business using just points?

Here are the UR transfer partners.

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Aer Lingus AerClub
Air France/KLM Flying Blue
British Airways Executive Club
Emirates Skywards
JetBlue TrueBlue
Singapore Airlines KrisFlyer
Southwest Airlines Rapid Rewards
United MileagePlus
Virgin Atlantic Flying Club
Iberia Plus

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I'm not a huge fan of United for international travel and I have status with United. There better are redemptions for your points IMO. I know Iberia flies to Greece and their redemptions in off-peak are excellent. I'm flying from Madrid to JFK next May for 34000 miles in business class. That said, United is easy to deal with.

We flew IB in business class in February, and it was quite disappointing. Dinner was poor, and breakfast was a joke. We're flying them again next week (using avios). Hopefully, it will be better.

I’ve flown Iberia business class from Madrid to JFK before. It was fine and was certainly a step above United and American business class across the pond.

At a transfer rate of 1:1.6 MR points to Avios at 18250 MR points for business class it was an outstanding redemption.

It seems there are benefit of just booking via UR points, as you get the benefits of booking the flight via the airline, instead of using airline points and not getting the flight credit.

If you have the CSR, it's 1.5 for everything. Seems simpler just to book via the Chase site, no?

Things I have read about transfers, especially airlines, you have to get extremely lucky to get a better rate.

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If you have the CSR, it's 1.5 for everything. Seems simpler just to book via the Chase site, no? Things I have read about transfers, especially airlines, you have to get extremely lucky to get a better rate.

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Extremely lucky? No, not at all. I'm in DFW right now, on my way back from Guatemala City. I flew BTR-GUA round-trip for 25,000 American Airlines miles + $60 tax, when the ticket would have cost me $700 if booked with money. In fact, you can't buy a BTR-GUA round-trip ticket today for less than $666 on any date of the year. That's 2.4 cpp, which is a lot more than the 1.5 cpp you get with booking through the Chase UR portal.

And that's on a coach ticket. Flying in international business class, you can often get 3 cpp or more through using frequent flier programs.

But it depends on your flying patterns. If you are flexible on dates, you can get a lot better value through airline programs, because the purpose of the programs (from the airline's perspective) is to get something for seats that would otherwise be empty. On the other hand, if you want to fly somewhere during Thanksgiving, Christmas, or Spring Break weeks, then airline programs will basically be useless, because they won't have any empty seats on those days.

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Extremely lucky? No, not at all

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Poorly worded on my part, in reading a points guy article, they discussed the better values, but also mentioned what you state about flexible dates, off seasons, etc, which is great for those who can do that, but typically doesn't work for me personally.

I think the other thing is the international flying, which I never do, so I don't have that experience. I also have a smaller home airport, and would have to drive about 1.5 hours to another, so that I think also limits my options to a degree.