Overview of ANA Award Taxes and Fees

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ANA is a Japanese airline that’s a member of Star Alliance and its award search engine is one of the best ways to find Star Alliance availability. ANA is also a transfer partner of American Express Membership Rewards (transfers usually take about 48 hours) – which you earn on cards like the Premier Rewards Gold and the Platinum – and Starwood Preferred Guest (transfers can take up to a couple weeks), which makes it a very versatile program to maximize when it comes time to redeem some of those points for an award on a Star Alliance carrier.

However, ANA does levy fuel surcharges on many of its partners, so as a follow-up to my series on Aeroplan Star Alliance award taxes and fees, I wanted to do another series going through awards on each of ANA’s Star Alliance partners and looking at the taxes and fees associated with each.

Searching For Awards on ANA

ANA’s search engine pulls in almost totally up-to-date Star Alliance award availability. You must sign up for a Mileage Club account here and then login to use the search engine here. Award availability is shown 330 days in advance. To actually find awards and the taxes and fees on a particular itinerary, you need to have enough miles in your account to book it, which is why I hope that this series proves useful to some of you out there who want to know what you’ll be paying before committing to a points transfer.

Distance-Based Awards

The other important factor in determining whether ANA should be the program you use is that its award chart is distance based, so you need to know how many miles your trip is to figure out how many ANA miles are required for the award and awards are calculated based on the roundtrip distance.

I personally use gcmap.com to figure out distances between city pairs. For example, JFK-LHR-JFK is 6,903 miles so it comes in just under the 7,000 mile threshold so business class awards are only 63,000 miles, which is great because Virgin Atlantic is a partner airline and they have a lot of availability, so in certain circumstances, you could be saving significant mileage by transferring to ANA instead of using miles from one of its Star Alliance partner airlines.

What I Searched For

To get a good cross-section from which to extrapolate, I looked at award availability for specific segments – both international and regional – so that I could find how much the taxes and fees would be for various routes on ANA’s partners in both economy and business classes. For instance, with ANA itself, I looked at how much it would cost to redeem a domestic award in economy and business, and then transpacific flights in economy and business as well. Note, all mileage requirements will be quoted roundtrip and taxes and fees in US dollars.

The fee structure is similar on many of these awards whether you’re flying from Los Angeles or New York to Tokyo, for example, so this is really just a cross-section from which to estimate what your taxes and fees will be. By choosing which partner you fly carefully, you can save hundreds of dollars in taxes and fees (for a good example, check out fees on transpacific flights on Air Canada versus ANA).

For this installment, I’ve just done the redemptions and conversions for some of the most popular Star Alliance carriers including: Air Canada, ANA, Lufthansa, Singapore Airlines, SWISS, Thai Airways, Turkish Airlines, United and US Airways, and will do an update with further Star Alliance partners.

Once I find all these redemptions on ANA’s Star Alliance partners, I’ll put together a comprehensive spreadsheet with estimates of taxes and fees to help you plot out your next award.

AIR CANADA

TRANSATLANTIC
Route: Montreal – Geneva
Class: Economy
Miles Required: 43,000
Taxes and Fees: $76.60USD

Route: Montreal – Geneva
Class: Business
Miles Required: 68,000
Taxes and Fees: $76.60USD

TRANSPACIFIC
Route: Vancouver-Tokyo
Class: Economy
Miles: 55,000
Taxes and Fees: $71.70 USD

Route: Vancouver – Tokyo
Class: Business
Miles: 85,000
Taxes and Fees: $71.70 USD

DOMESTIC
Route: Toronto – Vancouver
Class: Economy
Miles Required: 38,000
Taxes and Fees: $47.50 USD

Route: Toronto – Vancouver
Class: Business
Miles: 63,000
Taxes and Fees: $47.50 USD

ANA

TRANS-PACIFIC
Route: Los Angeles – Tokyo
Class: Economy
Miles: 50,000
Taxes and Fees: $660.90 USD

Route: Los Angeles – Tokyo
Class: Business
Miles: 80,000
Taxes and Fees: $660.90 USD

INTRA-ASIAN
Route: Tokyo-Beijing
Class: Economy
Miles: 17,000
Taxes and Fees: $194.40 USD

Route: Tokyo-Beijing
Class: Business
Miles: 35,000
Taxes and Fees: $194.40 USD

LUFTHANSA

TRANSATLANTIC
Route: New York – Frankfurt
Class: Economy
Miles: 43,000 Miles
Taxes and Fees: $675 USD

Route: New York- Frankfurt
Class: Business
Miles: 68,000 Miles
Taxes and Fees: $1,014.60 USD

INTRA-EUROPEAN
Route: Frankfurt – Munich
CLASS: Economy
Miles: 20,000
Taxes and Fees: $221 USD

Route: Frankfurt – Munich
Class: Business
Miles: 38,000
Taxes and Fees: $221 USD

SINGAPORE AIRLINES

TRANSPACIFIC
Route: Los Angeles – Tokyo
Class: Economy
Miles: 55,000
Taxes and Fees: $360.70 USD

Route: Los Angeles – Singapore
Class: Economy
Miles: 65,000
Taxes and Fees: $696.30 USD

INTRA-ASIAN
Route: Seoul – Singapore
Class: Economy
Miles: 38,000
Taxes and Fees: $289.80 USD

Route: Seoul – Singapore
Class: Business
Miles: 63,000
Taxes and Fees: $327.80 USD

UNITED AIRLINES

TRANSATLANTIC
Route: Newark- Madrid
Class: Economy
Miles: 43,000
Taxes and Fees: $55.00 USD

Route: Newark- Madrid
Class: Business
Miles: 68,000
Taxes and Fees: $55.00 USD

TRANSPACIFIC
Route: San Francisco – Tokyo
Class: Economy
Miles: 55,000
Taxes and Fees: $659.90 USD

DOMESTIC
Route: Los Angeles – Newark
Class: Economy
Miles: 38,000
Taxes and Fees: $5.00 USD

Route: Los Angeles – Newark
Class: Business
Miles: 63,000
Taxes and Fees: $5.00 USD