Southwest tops in airline rewards ranking

Travelers love amassing airline rewards points. The frustration often comes when they try to redeem them for a ticket and find it next to impossible to get a seat on a flight when or where they want to go.

A new survey of reward seat availability finds that Southwest Airlines, the biggest carrier at John Glenn Columbus International Airport, remained the top airline worldwide in 2018 for reward-seat availability.

Of the three other U.S. airlines that made the top 10, two serve Columbus: Air Canada (No. 2) and American Airlines (No. 9). Jet Blue, which ranks fourth, behind Turkish Airlines, does not.

The survey, conducted by Wisconsin-based airline consulting firm IdeaWorks and sponsored by Irish travel technology firm CarTrawler, was compiled by checking the availability of “saverstyle” seat rewards (the lowest standard level) at various times between June and October of this year.

On Southwest, 100 percent of the mileage redemption tickets were available; for Air Canada, it was 96.4 percent, and for American, 82.1 percent.

Several European airlines ranked worse, with Avianca and Scandinavian having availability less than half the time.

American saw the biggest year-over-year increase, moving up by 27.8 points. It had mileage reward tickets available 82.1 percent of the time.

The study’s authors say that generous mileage award redemption availability increases satisfaction among rewards program members. In turn, “happy members buy more tickets and use their co- branded credit cards more often,” the authors said in a press release.

The survey also found a trend among airlines toward continuing to base awards on spending rather than mileage, a change made by Southwest several years ago. And some airlines, such as Delta Air Lines, are making some saver tickets available for as little as 12,000 miles instead of the previous minimum of 25,000 miles.