Wayline

Hi everyone,

I fly EVA Air from South East Asia (SIN, BKK) - TPE - North America (SEA, JFK, ORD) quite often on Y/B fares, and I've been trying to find the optimal strategy to maximize miles on Star Alliance Upgrade Awards (SAUA).

After looking through most of the airlines SAUA charts, I found that requesting SAUAs through United and AirCanada to be the cheapest:

North America to TPE:
Aeroplan: 25k miles per segment
United: 30k miles per segment

TPE to South East Asia
Aeroplan: 25k miles per segment
United: 15k miles per segment

North America - TPE - South East Asia
Aeroplan: 50k miles
United: 45k miles
Combination of Aeroplan (NA to TPE) + United (TPE to SE Asia): 40k miles

So it seems like using Aeroplan to request a SAUA for the NA - TPE segment, and Mileageplus for the TPE - SE Asia segment would use the least amount of miles.

Question 1: Is this possible to request SAUA from different frequent flyer accounts?

Question 2: If I intend to credit the miles to my MileagePlus account, will requesting SAUAs from different frequent flyer accounts complicate the crediting of miles to my MileagePlus account?

P.S. I chose Aeroplan and United also because Aeroplan is a transfer partner with AMEX MR, while United is a transfer partner with Chase. Thus, it's easily to accumulate the miles needed for these upgrades.

Thanks in advance!

Mwenenzi

Frequent flyer miles/points of different ffp's are not equal.
They cannot always be taken as 1:1
Frequent flyer miles/points are not equal to earn.
Frequent flyer miles/points are not equal to burn.
Some times they are equal but often not
Earn to burn is what matters.
As does expiry http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/miles...-t-expire.html
Effectively you cannot transfer miles between ffp's.

UA thread http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/unite...-carriers.html

Wayline

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Wayline

Hi Mwenenzi,

I believe you misunderstood me.
I'm not asking whether I could transfer miles between programs.

Instead, I'm asking whether I could request for SAUAs using two different ffps for different segments of the trip (assuming I already have the miles needed in each program, and since SAUAs are requested by segment, and not the entire itinerary), and whether doing so will jeopardize my ability to credit the elite miles for that flight to a specific ffp.

malmostoso

Upgrades are always on a segment basis, so on a US - TPE - SEAsia you would have to split the upgrades in two.

Regarding your second question, I recently had an upgrade on SQ, paid with LH miles, where the underlying Y fare credited to TK without problems.

Make sure you keep evidence of having a specific FFP number in the original reservation which states the booking class (after upgrade your ticket will show "I" class which does not earn anything).

dvs7310

I'm not quite following what you're going after there. The OP mentioned transferring points from Amex and Chase to pay for the upgrades, so for the OP at least, those miles are pretty much equally valued. A dollar spend to earn a mile in either case. 5k bonus for transferring 20k with Amex, so maybe that makes them a little better value.

I think people earning miles with credit card vs flying BIS would value the miles quite differently and people doing a transfer from Chase, Amex, Diners, etc. probably don't care about expiration timing since the transfer is usually done with the purpose of spending them right away.


For the OP, I don't use the *A Upgrade program often but when I have there has never been an issue crediting the flights to my desired program. Also, I personally wouldn't bother upgrading the TPE-SE Asia segment, it's too short of a flight for the number of miles required.

Having said all that, you may run into an issue on BR with *A Upgrades, they do (or at least until recently used to) apply the Married Segment logic to a lot of connecting tickets, so upgrades weren't processing under the *A upgrade program. I don't know if this has even been fixed or not, but you may be lucky if your flights don't involve married segments. There were a lot of complaints about it before.

grant2112

As of last month it would appear that EVA was still using married segment logic that kept me from completing a SAUA for the TPAC segment of a xxx-TPE-LAX ticket. Immediately cancelled that ticket and rebooked as two individual tickets and the TPE-LAX SAUA was immediately successful. This was using the United SAUA engine with UA miles.