MilesBuzz! - OnePass vs. MileagePlus

I typically fly USAir or Continental, but have 54K miles sitting in my United account. The only time I currently fly UAL is with USAir miles through their codeshare. Would I be better off moving the 54K miles to OnePass through Amtrak (a portion this year and a portion next year). I seem to be hoarding OnePass miles because I'm trying to whittle away at my USAir balance since they seem to be less financially stable than Continental.

I guess my real question is to determine if rewards are easier to come by on CO or UAL? There is no sense for me to move the miles to CO if UAL rewards are more readily available.

I have moved 25k of my CO Nonepass miles to UA through Amtrak over the last couple of months and plan on moving the rest over at the beginning of 2004. I am so frustrated with CO that I have virtually sworn off giving them (and both DL and NW) any of my business. A lot of discussions on their Elite status changes for 2004 and the lack of available Standard awards can be found in the CO forum. My decision was based on the fact that I was sick of not being able claiming a Standard Award with them over the last two years. Every time I was planning a vacation trip, I called them first but could never get anything for 25K per ticket. I personally have found that UA and US have been better at claiming standard awards. US used to be horrible but I have not had many problems with them in the last year or so!

I personally would not recommed moving any miles into your CO account due to my experiences with them. Have you had any problems claiming awards with them in the past? I would recommend searching Flyertalk for discussions on CO redemption before you do anything.

Good advice up above
Count me in as one who gave up on Continental long ago.
Back in the late 90s.
While I was flying and earning hundreds of thousands of miles with Continental I had no idea they would be virtually useless to a wide variety of destinations.

While reward inventory remains tight at a number of airlines I can't think of anybody less satisfactory then Continental .
Stingy would be a polite term
With that said next in line would certainly be their new partners Delta and Northwest/KLM. In that order.
The thing that amazed me is Continental kept winning awards year after year for what they did well. And many of us supported them.
Despite that this has been a severe ongoing problem for many years.
I tried to spread the word for a number of years but few listened.
The nice folks that work for Continental kind of blind you to the bottom line which in this case is ease of availability.

What I have suspected for many years is that most bank miles in a given program without doing a check of overall award availability first with whom they choose to do business with.Some published statistics exist too.
Many of those folks blindly invest in a company (self included) and its promotional offers until it is very often to late.
It is lesson that Continental taught me very well .One that will never be repeated again. At least in my case http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/smile.gif

Finally a large volume of Continentals customers are getting wiser after trying to use their miles.
It is finally coming back to effect their bottom line.
Think this new partnership will bail them out of a tough spot they otherwise might have found themselves in. The timing was right to help them hide behind the wall of their partnership.
Good luck with your choice.
Sounds like your on the right track.



[This message has been edited by 777 global mile hound (edited Dec 03, 2003).]

While you can move Continental miles to United via Amtrak, it is NOT possible to move United miles to Continental via Amtrak.

See Does CO->Amtrak->UA really work? (http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/Forum1/HTML/009175.html)

Advice from a current CO customer - burn OnePass miles at every opportunity. You'll find much more success using UA miles.

Agree with the views above -- OnePass miles are close to worthless, and CO award availability is the worst in the industry.

OnePass won all those awards in the late '90s/early '00s because of their liberal domestic upgrade policy. (A lot of FFers are more focused on flying in F than redeeming awards.)

Now more people are figuring out that the redemption side of the program is virtually fraudulent -- there ARE NO AWARDS at the "Standard" rate to many/most choice destinations (Europe, Hawaii).

And as CO is now making Elite status harder to attain, making those F upgrades available to fewer people, you are going to see more OnePass members finally focus on redemption and express more and more outrage.

Against my expectations, frankly, it looks like UA and the MP program are going to stay around (albeit in smaller, humbler form) but earning and redemption opportunities are both FAR better and friendlier than on CO.

<font face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size="2">Originally posted by BearX220:


OnePass won all those awards in the late '90s/early '00s because of their liberal domestic upgrade policy. (A lot of FFers are more focused on flying in F than redeeming awards.)

Now more people are figuring out that the redemption side of the program is virtually fraudulent -- there ARE NO AWARDS at the "Standard" rate to many/most choice destinations (Europe, Hawaii).

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I used to wonder about those awards too. Then one year I saw that the Freddies had a suprisingly low number of votes for a winner in a certain category. This was the early 90s as I recall the winner in a category got less than 10,000 votes. Not much when you consider MP has over 20 million members.

Anyone remember when the Cincinnati Reds had all eight of their starters voted onto the all-star team? I think it was shortly after that they eliminated fan voting for a while.

Thanks for all of your input. I guess that I will have to leave all of the miles where they are. I did not realize that Amtrak does not permit UAL to Amtrak to CO transfers. Additionally, based on reponses redeeming CO miles may not be nearly as easy as UAL. Actually, I haven't attempted to redeem CO miles in a few years since I keep using my USAir miles. It soudns like I should attempt to redeem CO miles before USAir miles given their difficulty of redemption.

Thanks all!

<font face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size="2">Originally posted by christianj:
I have moved 25k of my CO Nonepass miles to UA through Amtrak over the last couple of months and plan on moving the rest over at the beginning of 2004. </font>

Just wondering, are you sure the 25k ceiling is per calendar year, and not based upon 365 days since your last xfer?

I stopped accumulating Nonepass miles over a year ago; which is to say I stopped, cold-turkey, charging/using my Chase/Continental co-branded credit card. Who would want to accumulate miles that are very UNuseable ?

Wonder if Chase knows they are losing substantial charges from me alone, and I assume the problem extrapolates to other Chase/Continental affinity cardholders, due to Continental's very obvious screwing of Nonepass flyers over aprotacted period, literally as a corporate "gameplan" IMO ? If Chase reads these threads, they should know.

Yeah, Continental wants [our] dollars when they sell their worthless miles to affinity partners, but they seem not to be willing to want to redeem same. Tsk

I have long wondered why Randy doesn't establish the CONSUMER-FRIENDLY criteria of SCORING DOMESTIC 25-K SEAT AVAILABILITY to be a major component of the airline freddy (guess it could be extrapolated to hotels also).

As it stands now - Every year that Nonepass wins - I believe Freddy awards lose credibility, and certainly applicability to my life and travel patterns.

But - main point of this was to highlight how Chase loses a respectable chunk of annual charges of mine because of their tie-in now to Nonepass.

<font face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size="2">Originally posted by ronin:
Just wondering, are you sure the 25k ceiling is per calendar year, and not based upon 365 days since your last xfer?</font>

Yes, quite sure.

<font face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size="2">Originally posted by ILUVCITIBANK:
I have long wondered why Randy doesn't establish the CONSUMER-FRIENDLY criteria of SCORING DOMESTIC 25-K SEAT AVAILABILITY to be a major component of the airline freddy (guess it could be extrapolated to hotels also). </font>Actually, there is a Freddie Award for Best Award Redemption (http://www.freddieawards.com/events/results.php?event_key=6&cat_name=Best_Award_Redemption). Among North American airlines it was won by Southwest followed by Alaska and Aeromexico. (America West was 4th). Continental has never won this award (http://www.freddieawards.com/archives/am/bestredem.htm).

<font face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size="2">As it stands now - Every year that Nonepass wins - I believe Freddy awards lose credibility, and certainly applicability to my life and travel patterns.[/b]</font>

Continental did not win a single Freddie Award in 2003.

Its last win for Program of the Year was in 2000 (http://www.freddieawards.com/archives/am/progyear.htm). That's a long time ago...

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View from the Wing (http://www.webflyer.com/blog): A blog about Free Miles and Free Markets

[This message has been edited by gleff (edited Dec 02, 2003).]

There is no comparison. MileagePlus absolutely trounces OnePass when it comes to award availability. NonePass, as the program should be known, has had problems for years with lack of award availability. I gave up accumulating CO miles about 6 years ago when I realized I could never redeem those miles for much of anything at the standard award levels. The only miles that go into my CO account now are an occasional flight that I have to make on CO for business reasons. Luckily, they are few and far between.

In the meantime, I am stuck with close to 400K OnePass miles. I plan well ahead for almost all of my trips and have tried on a number of occasions to redeem the miles on CO with no luck. Keep your UA miles.

The UAers are not giving you an essental caveat: MP miles are good if you end up spending them on carriers OTHER THAN United, especially if you redeem for international C or F.

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Has YOUR airline won an award lately?

<font face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size="2">Originally posted by avek00:
The UAers are not giving you an essental caveat: MP miles are good if you end up spending them on carriers OTHER THAN United, especially if you redeem for international C or F.

</font>

Huh?

<font face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size="2">Originally posted by avek00:
The UAers are not giving you an essental caveat: MP miles are good if you end up spending them on carriers OTHER THAN United, especially if you redeem for international C or F.

</font>

There is no caveat needed. There is absolutely nothing wrong with redeeming miles on United.

The real caveat should be with CO miles, i.e., CO miles are worthless for getting awards on CO, but you may have a reasonable opportunity of getting an award on one of their partners.

In the past I was 1K on UA and Gold on CO and I will agree that there's never been a problem a problem getting UA awards--whether UA or Star. As far as CO, I've yet to fly on CO for an award. I have been able to get awards on NW using NonePass points but even those have been difficult at best without having to use the higher mileage awards.

Maybe I'm just lucky or it has something to do with being in Houston, but I recently booked a standard reward ticket from IAH-GIG with no problem (booked in October for trip in January) - and it's only 35000 miles.

This is the only time I've booked an award ticket from CO, so I can't say whether it's always this easy from IAH. But it can be done.

I am interested in this discussion, b/c I also have tons of MileagePlus miles (thanks to the MP Visa), but have yet to find the availability I want for saver awards...at least by checking the web site.

FF

For years we tried to use our onepass miles for award travel from Europe to the US for my in-laws without success. Continental NEVER had anything from any European gateway, though they occasionally had partner award availablity on a convoluted routing. That said, last December we were able to book two 35K awards from LAX to Honolulu for travel around Easter. CO had several dates available and we didn't really have a problem. Delta, on the other hand, had NOTHING the whole month.

<font face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size="2">Originally posted by avek00:
The UAers are not giving you an essental caveat: MP miles are good if you end up spending them on carriers OTHER THAN United, especially if you redeem for international C or F.

</font>

The bottom line is that unlike with CO, the miles I earn on UA I can actually USE whether for upgrades or outright tickets on an airline/alliance with a REAL global network.

The only affiliation I have left with CO is about a million (literally) miles that I just can't get any redemption on. And that's even as a Platinum elite for whom CO supposedly makes better award availbility. It's all downhill from there.

Avek has been interestingly enough very quiet lately, especailly in the face of the GLORIUOUS changes and repercussions of the CO nOnePass program. Wonder what gives?

Everyone keep bashing CO about redemption. Two things here...1. You can almost always get an award you just have to use AllPass. It will cost you more miles but instead of complaining about huge amounts of miles that can't be used just cough up the extra miles and use them 2. If you need a last minute award the availibity is pretty awesome at the lower levels. Maybe a week or 10 days out.

<font face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size="2">Originally posted by coplatua1k:
Everyone keep bashing CO about redemption. Two things here...1. You can almost always get an award you just have to use AllPass. It will cost you more miles but instead of complaining about huge amounts of miles that can't be used just cough up the extra miles and use them 2. If you need a last minute award the availibity is pretty awesome at the lower levels. Maybe a week or 10 days out. </font>
These are features of pretty much every frequent flyer program.

Most programs offer awards without capacity controls (more or less) for extra miles. So CO isn't offering anything competitive here. Where they fail is at the standard (lower) mileage requirement.

Airlines also dump award seats into inventory when it's clear the seats won't sell. CO is not at all unique in this regard. I've had great luck on UA with F awards to Asia this way. I know of one member of this board who has even had great luck using UA miles for SQ F awards. And CO is no SQ. http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/biggrin.gif

<font face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size="2">Originally posted by gleff:

I know of one member of this board who has even had great luck using UA miles for SQ F awards. And CO is no SQ. http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/biggrin.gif</font>

IS he still a member of this board - Jim Phillips above is also is wondering aloud about his whereabouts. http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/wink.gif

And he DID need to phone United EIGHTEEN times to badger them into issuing it, so who among us has THAT kind of time. http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/biggrin.gif

But yes, back to topic, UA has ALWAYS came thru for me. We moved out CO miles into HH this year as they were useless by and large.



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~ Glen ~ sipping bubbly from a UA 747-400 exit row 15 near you SOON!

I've had low 6-figure balances in both programs ever since moving 175K from CO to UA before the door slammed mostly shut, and can say I've been much happier with UA availability so far. They literally saved my summer Asia trip after CO/NW had their solid wall of no-availability. If you've been on the phone much trying to book CO awards (and you still have to use the phone if you want stopovers, open jaws or anything complex), you often might get the impression they're not really trying. They'll say that entire 2- or 3-month blocks are devoid of award seats 5-6 months out (even to multiple airports) but, of course, there's EasyPass. Or, if you'd consulted the "Reward Travel Forecast," you'd see that Atlanta-Cleveland is wide open and you can also get good availability to Bogota.

About all I can say good about CO is that the 25K intra-Asia award is still a good deal, and I'll keep some miles so I can do more of those. Some of the Micronesian destinations and CNS and DPS are good as trips from places like MNL, HKG, TPE and Japan. It's probably because Continental Micronesia is underbooked due to sky-high paid fares on the monopoly routes; if that changes, it'll no doubt pinch award availability.