Note: newer and better chart is available
Have you ever questioned the amount of award partners many airlines have, beside their major alliances? In fact, majority of the airlines offer award tickets on lesser-known partner airlines. Here is a graph for major airlines presented in the Awards Chart. Not all links are bidirectional, and there are way more partner airlines not listed. Wait until your browser arranges all connections, and click on any image to see the airline partners.
The graph is overwhelming, and its practical usability is close to zero. Most of the valuable non-alliance partner deals are already known to many award ticket researchers – Virgin Atlantic, Avios, and FlyingBlue. Still, I was interested to see the inter-connectivity between some well-known partners like Alaska, Etihad, Virgin, etc.