If you’re flying on American Airlines, you might assume that you can only earn AAdvantage miles from those flights. However, American Airlines partners with dozens of other airlines — many of which will let you credit American flights to their mileage programs. And the best place to credit your American flight may not be the AAdvantage program.

The options may be confusing and overwhelming, but there’s a shortcut to figuring out where to credit your flights — and it’s worth the time and effort. The prize for your research may be earning a free flight sooner or scoring elite status from a partner airline faster than a U.S.-based airline.

Here are some of the tools you can use to figure this out, and some examples of how this works in practice. While this guide looks at American Airlines examples, the same process applies to any airline that participates in partnerships, alliances or code-sharing.

There’s one tool that’s incredibly valuable in your quest to maximize mileage earnings from flights. And it has a very fitting name: Where To Credit.

This straightforward website lets you put in the airline and booking class of a flight to find out how a flight would credit to different airline mileage programs. However, there are two critical pieces of information that you need before you can use this tool:

The airline.

The booking class.

Identify the airline

This might seem straightforward at first, but airline partnerships can complicate things. For example, American and Alaska Airlines have recently signed a code-share agreement. Soon, you might be flying on an American airplane, but for the sake of mileage credit the airline could be Alaska — or vice versa. On international flights (thanks to alliances and partnerships), it can be even more complicated. The simple rule is to look at which airline is shown with the flight number.

For example, for visiting Bangkok in July, two of the return flights would be operated by Japan Airlines, but they can be bought with an American Airlines flight number (routing through Chicago and on to Atlanta). That means that for flight credit purposes, the airline is American Airlines.

Identify the booking class

Finding the booking class can be more complicated. This is something that’s easiest to find when you’re initially booking a flight. Each airline shows it a bit differently, but there’s usually some way to check flight details. For example, American has a “Details” link that you can click during booking to see details like the booking code.

However, you’re not out of luck if you didn’t note this during booking. Sometimes you can find the booking class in your confirmation email, or you can use a tool like AwardWallet to import your reservations and store that information.

In this case, this flight is booking class Q:

Find your credit chart

You can now use the "Airline" and "Booking Class" filters on the Where To Credit site to get the appropriate chart. Keep this chart handy for later.