Award flights
Reading an award chart
Zones, distance bands and dynamic pricing are three different things. Which of the charts here is which, and what that means for planning.
18
published charts priced here
27
airline programmes
1,207
airports the engine knows
Three kinds of chart
A zone chart prices by region: everywhere in Europe costs the same from Delhi. A distance band prices by how far you actually fly, so a short hop inside a zone is cheaper. Both are published tables you can read in advance.
Dynamic pricing is the third, and it is not a chart at all: the price is whatever the airline's system decides that day. Those programmes appear here only where they publish something fixed.
Why the lowest price is not always the answer
The board sorts by points because that is the figure you hold. But the programme charging 5,000 more miles with no surcharge often wins once the cash is counted, and the one with a 3-day transfer may lose the seat entirely.
Charts move
Programmes devalue with little notice and sometimes none. Every chart here carries a link to the airline's own page and the date it was last read, and a script re-checks those links daily so a dead one is caught rather than quietly served.