Originally Posted by
joshman
One more note is ANA will expire your unused mileage and they charge very high fuel surcharges. An example I can show you is if you use ANA Miles for a *A flight from LAX-FRA I often had to pay upwards of $250-300 in bogus charges. Booking the same flight using AC miles was about $70.
AFAIK fuel surchages are charged by the airline you fly on rather than by the FFP you belong to.
It only took me 90k miles for YVR-HKG in business on AC whereas AC via Aeroplan wanted 120k or 115k (can't remember precisely) for the same flight.
But you should also consider how many miles you can earn with each FFP for the route and class of travel you regularly use.
And you don't have to confine yourself to UA and ANA. You may want to take a look at the Star Alliance Forum for more information, especially this thread.
http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/star-...nce-links.html