Originally Posted by
aacharya
I have to ask:
Paying for 7K miles is easily $770 spend (2 cpm for the RDM, 9 cpm for the PQM).
With months ahead of flying, why not a quick mileage run?
Note that upgrades do not impact PQM and even if they did, an interesting decision, as a reroute through IAH would have gotten you more miles.
Milage runs are prohibitively expensive when you're based out of Guam.
When realized that I would be 5000 PQMs short I kept searching for itineraries that would offer me 5000 PQMs at the checkout screen, but I was only getting offers for 4000 or 6000. I figured I could buy the 4000 PQMs and do a mileage run to nearby Saipan (129 miles away and thus 500PQM each way) but all the flights were at least $200 RT. Flying to Japan, Manila, Hong Kong, or Island hopper routes all had similar earning rates around $0.20 per PQM. I ended up purchasing an itinerary in order to see if it offered me a PQM package between 4000 and 6000 and that ended up working, just cancelled the flight within 24 hrs.
Originally Posted by
eng3
Congrats, but you might want to question buying miles to get status next time. Sure if you're short by a few miles and don't have time at the end of the year for a quick MR, but status is only useful when you actually travel. So if you don't actually travel that much, the status isn't as valuable.
Ofcourse the value is different from everyone. Again, Congrats!
It's worth it to me because the large majority of my United flying is done on Y full fare economy tickets. Being able to instant upgrade into the PN fare class instead of R is a game changer. I have an island hopper flight planned for the end of September and it is going to be nice to clear every single one of those segments well in advance. Sure, I could have paid a few hundred to purchase the J ticket by paying the fare difference but this also gets me all the other fringe benefits that go along with (published) top tier.
Originally Posted by
RobOnLI
Congrats on hitting 1K exactly on the nose. Nice round number.
When you said you were offered an upgrade through IAH do you mean you were offered a re-route due to an oversell? If so they would have rebooked you in a "paid" first class fare code and you would have earned 2x or even 3x the miles. LAX-PBI via EWR is 3400 miles and via IAH is 2330. If it wasn't related to an oversell situation then it would have not gotten you PQM multipliers so you would have been about 1100 miles short.
-RM
I had about 10 minutes to make a decision after I I found out what was really going on. The MileagePlus desk wasn't open that early and no one on the ground could give me a good answer about how my earnings would change. Knowing what I know now, it probably would have been fine, but the idea of commuting from Ventura, where I was living at the time, to LAX to make another mileage run sometime between 10 Dec and 31 Dec for essentially a few hundred miles didn't seem worth it when I knew that I had a sure thing flying Y via EWR.