Originally Posted by
superflip
Suppose that there are two persons, who I shall imaginatively call Person A and Person B. Let us suppose that A and B are related, A is of low (QFF) status and B is of high status. (I have a particular low/high status combination that I personally care the most about (B is gold), but the question is naturally this general.
If person A wants to book an award flight, then (s)he has two possibilities:
(a) book from own account
(b) family transfer points to Person B, and book from B's account.
I would like to know what benefits, either published or unpublished, there are for choosing option (b). From experience, I can hazard a guess at a couple which I reproduce below, though I am not sure the second is an actual benefit or was a fluke.
(i) Access to greater award space availability.
(ii) Access to Main Cabin Extra seating on an economy redemption in AA.
If the low status person books from the high status account, there
may be increased award availability to choose from.
However - that's where the benefits stop. Any other benefits (access to preferred seating etc) will be dependent on the status of the traveler, not the account of the person making the booking. When completing the booking there are a couple of boxes where the FF number of the actual traveler is entered, and that then forms the basis of benefits.
Exception: in some cases Platinum 1 members requesting upgrades from their account for others will confer a their higher status on the lower member when it comes to upgrade priority.