Originally Posted by
KeithVertrees
I've made some stupid mistakes on accruing miles this year. It's my first year traveling for work and just didn't think it through. I have the following qualifying balances:
AA: 11.7k
Delta: 9.4k
UA: 9.6k
US: 20k
I need to book IAD -> LAX -> MEL and back for early November, along with some other domestic travel, and I'm trying to figure out where I should put those miles. The travel to Australia could either go on UA/US or AA and another 4 or 5k in domestic travel could also be UA/US or AA. The trip to Australia will put me in Silver on US and the additional domestic travel would put me in Gold, so I'm leaning toward booking on UA and using my US number.
But, I'm concerned about what's going to happen with this merger and the potential transition from *A to OW.
I'm going to be doing probably 50-75k miles next year as well, including one or two SE asia or Europe trips, but mostly domestic RIC/IAD to AUS, DEN, and SFO.
Any advice is greatly appreciated.
You have some significant mileage coming up the rest of the year. My best advice is to treat the already-accrued as a sunk cost. Think about your flying patterns going forward, specifically the airports you're OK flying from (you said RIC and IAD, so I assume going up to DCA isn't something you want to do) and where to (AUS, DEN, SFO should all be non-stops on UA given that IAD is a hub). UA seems like the right choice, since you get the most benefit of elite status when flying the actual airline that you have status with.
Now, I do think US Gold currently receives better benefits than the equivalent UA tier, especially if upgrades are your primary concern. But unless you're willing to go to DCA or regularly fly a short segment from RIC to a hub, you'd probably see a lot more UA metal than US.