Originally Posted by
Sulicadiz
(1) What is your home airport? (SFO, LAX, MCO, etc.) XRY and MAD
(2) What types of fares do you usually buy ? (C, F, Y, etc.) depends. When I travel forward the cheapest (Y) when I return with the client business fare (C)
(3) How many miles do you usually fly each year? (<25K, 25k-50k, >50k) with StarAlliance 25-50k
(4) Do you have any kind of status at present? What is it? I am Ruby with OneWorld. With StarAlliance I have avianca and have 19000 points, I have yet to get to the next tier.
(5) What is most important to you in a FFP? (Frequent upgrades on travel, priority services when flying the airline, good award redemption rates, free lounge access, etc.) To keep the miles (long time for redempting them, and fast upgrades).
An easy way to redeeem miles and an easy way to contact them to claim my miles (since most of the times I have to claim them afterwards). Earn cheap flights to enjoy (when I travel for pleasure the cheaper the better)
(6) Which routes do you fly most often (US Domestic, Transpacific etc) Completely random. To North and South America, to Asia...mainly long flights doing layoffs in Europe.
(7) Preferred Airlines Any From this program Lufthansa is good and near Spain. Singapore is really good and Thai is excellence
(8) Do you travel for work or pleasure? (Can you chooose your airlines, class of service?) predominantly for work (90% of times). My company pays for the tickets
Important note: Before I knew this forum I enrolled on Avianca. But its market is South America and the whole site is ....:
- I can't redeem miles into products since I live in Spain.
- No clear information of the routes they offer and what I can do with my miles.
- Every time I want to claim lost miles I have to contact the call center since you can't do it online (I don't know if they have an email for this purpose). And the telephone service is really bad (20 minutes each time I want to claim points and 1 or 2 weeks for them to contact the other company...).
I am not happy with Avianca at all. I have thought about waiting to get the upgrade (I have more than 19000 points and I only have to get 22000) and then use the points in some flight.
Another reason is that I never know in which company my boss is going to book the flight and 1 of their conditions to get to the next tier is to flight more than 10000 miles (I will never know if I will fly with them again or not)...
So bad decision to enroll with this company.
Write off those AV miles and move on.
If you enjoy flying LH and you only fly cheap economy out of Europe, then M&M could not be a horrendous idea.
Booking online award flights works well and you can retroclaim easily. However, redeeming award flights comes with high taxes. Also miles expire after 3 years, however since you are based in XRY maybe you have the opportunity to request the M&M credit card in Portugal? That should keep your miles from expiring (read the T&Cs though!).
With M&M you will always get reasonable earning in C, so whichever airline you fly on your return trips you should be sorted.
Finally, even if you only manage FTL status with LH (30 segments or 35k miles) you will still be able to enjoy Business lounge access in LH Group lounges, which means no access in MAD or XRY but definitely in FRA or MUC (or BRU or VIE or...)