In our May issue, we took a look at award choices for our cover story. We also recently conducted two surveys regarding your award choices and here’s a little of what we learned. Stopovers on award tickets are more popular than open jaws with 65.2 percent having obtained an award with a stopover and 45.7 percent an open jaw. Only 22 percent have ever redeemed an award with a stopover AND an open jaw.

Of those responding, 35.9 percent have claimed a one-way flight award while the majority (44.4 percent) stated that one-way awards are “good to have.” A very small percentage (1.1 percent) have claimed around-the-world award tickets.

Not surprisingly, of the 10 types of awards we asked respondents to rate, upgrades came in as the most popular with 57.1 percent saying upgrades are “very important” and 25.3 percent saying they are “good to have.” When asked what types of awards were claimed most often, upgrades came in as the second most popular at around 20 percent–flight awards are the most prevalent at 70 percent of awards claimed.

Free stopovers on award tickets were also seen as “very important” (48.9 percent) and “good to have” (37.0 percent) and open jaws on flight awards were seen as “very important” (47.2 percent) and “good to have” (39.3 percent).

The awards seen as most “useless” were auctions (51.6 percent), merchandise (54.9 percent) and magazine/newspapers (59.3 percent).