<font face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size="2">Originally posted by enjoystravel:
CO --> Amtrak --> UA seems to be another example of a lot of "cheap" to "valuable" miles conversion exercise. UA has such great awards to Australia and seems to have much better availability than CO for saver/standard awards.</font>
"Cheap" vs. "valuable" is a matter of opinion and what you want to do with the miles. Personally I have hated most of my experience on UA so I would not call their miles valuable. Also, if you want to go to South America, CO has awards for 35k anywhere on the continent while UA can be as high as 50k. I do not know who has the best availability for standard/saver awards, but it seems to be a matter of luck and where you are trying to go. I doubt that anyone, unless he is on the inside, would know either as the airline reps will not divulge how many saver seats are on any given flight - they claim that they do not even know.
I guess a better subject of this thread should be "converting miles from one program to another without losing value in the exchange." Most of the ways to convert miles do so at poor rates.