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You can add a free one way to one way awards booked with Alaska Airlines miles. That means you can add two free one ways to roundtrip awards.

A free one way is a separate trip, separated by days or months from your main trip, that adds zero extra miles to the cost of your award.

For instance, if you live in Los Angeles a free one way would be:

fly from Sydney to Los Angeles for 42,500 miles in economy
months later fly from Los Angeles to Puerto Vallarta, Mexico on the same award for zero extra miles

Screen Shot 2014-12-01 at 1.18.55 AM — Free One Way in Green is Taken Months Later and Adds Zero Miles to Price

(Yes, this is a legal free one way with Alaska miles.)

Alaska Airlines has the most generous free one way policy in many ways.

You can add free one ways to one way awards
You can add free one ways to Mexico
You can add free one ways to Hawaii (even when the main award goes to Asia or Australia)
You can backtrack on your free one way
You can end your main award at one airport in a city and start your free one way at another airport in the city (like flying into Newark and out of JFK)
Alaska has amazing partners, and free one ways are available on awards that use any partner.

Screen Shot 2014-11-30 at 1.53.47 PM — You can book awards on these airlines with Alaska miles

But there are limitations on free one ways. The biggest one:

On any one way award with Alaska Airlines miles, you can only fly one Alaska Airlines partner in addition to Alaska Airlines.

I’ll talk through this limitation and others in my full explanation of how to book free one ways with Alaska Airlines miles.

How do you book a free one way with Alaska miles?
Which partners are searchable online?
Where can your free one way go?
In which cabin can you fly your free one way?
How can you get Alaska miles?

How to Book an Alaska Airlines Award with a Free One Way

How to Search

Most free one ways can be booked right on alaskaair.com where you can search award space for almost all Alaska Airlines partners including:

Alaska Airlines
Horizon Air
AeroMexico
Air France
American Airlines
British Airways (fuel surcharges)
Delta
Emirates
Fiji
KLM
Korean
Qantas
Ravn Alaska (flights within Alaska)
PenAir (flights within Alaska)

The only two partners you cannot search and book on alaskaair.com are Cathay Pacific and LAN Airlines. Both are searchable on ba.com (here’s how), and bookable by calling Alaska at 800-252-7522 from 5 AM to midnight PT.

Begin your award search here and select “Multi-city” and “Use Miles.”

Type your main one way award and your free one way into two separate lines of the “Cities & Dates” fields and select the dates for each. Click “Find Flights.”

The above image shows someone who lives in Los Angeles who is searching for a main award home from Sydney to Los Angeles in April and a free one way award from Los Angeles to Portland in August.

The search results look like this.

To see the date of each individual flight, click on “1 stop” (or however many stops the itinerary has) under the individual itinerary.

For the first itinerary in the search results, the pop up detailing the flights looks like this.

You can see there is a 106-day stopover between the main award to Los Angeles and the free one way to Portland.

Since Sydney to Los Angeles costs 42,500 Alaska Airlines miles flying Qantas, the later flight from Los Angeles to Portland is a free one way. It adds zero miles to the award price.

Rules

Your free one way can go TO your home airport BEFORE the main award or FROM your home airport AFTER the main award. This will be obvious if you understand that a free one way is based on a stopover at your home airport not any sort of magic.
There is no limit to the length your stopover at home can be that separates your two trips. That being said, you can only book flights 11 months in advance, so fitting both the main trip and free one way into this window is the limit.
One way awards can only include one partner airline. You can either fly just that airline or that airline plus Alaska. This really limits some free one way possibilities if you don’t live at an airport with lots of Alaska flights.
The only airlines that cannot be booked one way are Delta and Korean. This is not a SkyTeam thing because Air France and KLM can be booked one way.
Your free one way can go to/from Hawaii.
Your free one way can go to/from Mexico.
Your free one way can go to/from Canada.
There is no rule against backtracking for your free one way.

Getting Alaska Miles

You can get Alaska Airlines miles from Alaska Airlines co-branded credit cards and Starwood Preferred Guest credit cards.

Alaska Airlines cards usually have very small sign up bonuses in the 25k to 30k mile range, but you can get a new one every 91+ days without closing the old ones.

Starwood Preferred Guest cards also have 25k or 30k sign up bonuses. Starpoints transfer 1:1 to Alaska miles with a 5,000 mile bonus for every 20,000 points transferred.