So over the past few months, I have been working on a project that I am calling the “Mile Matrix“. The concept is that there are many “quirks” on various airlines’ charts. One example is that on American Airlines, going from the Middle East to most of Asia is only 22,500 miles. Another is that Georgia (the country) is considered Asia by some airlines, and Europe by others.
While I was noticing some of these oddities, I came up with the idea for the Mile Matrix – an app that can show you the price (in miles)
It’s now available for beta-testing at https://www.pointswithacrew.com/mile-matrix/. It’s an open beta test – feel free to check it out and let me know of any bugs you find, or any enhancements that you think would work out. But go easy on me – we’re still only in beta! 😀
Using the Mile Matrix
When you load the Mile Matrix, you will see an unfiltered view, which gives you the complete table of every origin country to every other destination, in each class of service on several different airlines.
Some neighboring countries are combined into one single row (you can see Angola, Botswana and Namibia combined above) in an attempt to cut down on the total amount of data.
Using the filters
There are 2 filters on the top, which let you filter the Mile Matrix by class (Economy, Business or First), as well as choosing (or NOT choosing) particular airlines. I have a couple of other filters (transfer partner, regions) in mind, but currently there are just the 2. You can also use the Search box to put in a sample origin / destination. Here’s an example of what it looks like for just economy class, going from Israel to South Korea
Known Issues
So there are a few things with the Mile Matrix beta that I already know about.
- It doesn’t mention which airlines pass along fuel surcharges, which admittedly can make a big difference. Air Canada might give a business-class ticket from the US to Europe for only 45,000 miles (compared to 57,500 on United), but they also pass along a couple hundred dollars of fuel surcharges
- There are only 6 airlines listed – more coming!
- There is currently no way to distinguish promotional wards such as American’s off-peak awards. Right now, I have them listed at the lower (off-peak) value, though I know that those prices are only good for part of the year.
Even so, I think that the Mile Matrix can be instructive and useful – I hope you’ll agree!
Future plans
As I’ve mentioned, the Mile Matrix is currently in beta-testing, which means that there may still be some bugs, data inconsistencies, or other things that don’t look quite right.
I also plan on adding the award charts for other airlines. Currently I just have the charts loaded for United, American, Lufthansa, Air Canada, US Airways and Delta. I have most (many? some? all?) of the charts for the other airlines – but wanted to limit the amount of data to start. It was this project that was the reason that I already had the Delta award chart saved when Delta decided to remove their award chart a few weeks ago.
Questions? Comments?
I will post a FAQ later this week – in the meantime leave a comment or follow @MileMatrix on Twitter for updates.
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Dan Miller travels with his wife and 6 (SIX!) children. He loves to help families travel for free / cheap, especially larger families. If you are looking for help, drop him an email at 
It took me a moment to find America under C for Continental United States.
Makes sense. You can also just type in United States (any part of the word)
Wow, I was thinking of doing the same thing for a while. Let me know if you want any help! I have some programming chops 😉
Thanks! I am actually tossing up the idea of open-sourcing some or all of this to part of the community, but that is probably down the road some, if ever
Very cool. It would be helpful (though probably hard to implement) to take into account whether a particular class of service exists between two locations. For example, Costa Rica to Buenos Aires has First/Business First on United and so gets the higher price for First instead of the super low price for Business. It would also be nice to add the off-peak versus peak rates. I noticed that the rate within Africa in business on American is just 17,500 one way. Of course, Oneworld’s coverage in Africa is pretty limited. But would it be possible to fly from Tangier, Morocco to Johannesburg via London in Business for 17,500 each way? If so, it might make sense to take a cheap flight from Spain to Morocco and then use an award ticket to get the rest of the way to South Africa.
I can’t seem to find anything to book TNG-JNB but in theory it might be possible!
Yeah, I couldn’t book it through the website either, but maybe it could be done over the phone. I’ll have to give it a try!
Very cool idea!
great start !
I would provide filters to provide a source and destination country, specify class type and only then list results vs starting with too much data and filtering it down to what a user is looking for.
Great idea once it is finished. Personally I would think the ability to filter the countries should be top priority, not filtering out class and airline. If I want to see only United States to one part of the world, it is painstaking.
You can filter by countries by typing in the Search box, or did you mean something else?
I see nothing on the chart 🙁 It just says “loading.”