Hi everyone,

new to the vigorous status game, planning ahead for possibly making a run or two toward the end of the year to get over the hump for United platinum. In the course of planning this out, I’ve been monitoring deal sites for star alliance partners to try to make use of that loophole where you can earn disproportionate PQP on cheap long-haul partner flights.

But… it’s freaking impossible to figure out what earnings will be. The mileage plus partner PQP earnings are based on mileage earned, which in turn is based on fare class and distance. But like *none* of the star alliance airlines seem to provide this information anywhere reasonably accessible while shopping for flights. It’s either buried or only accessible right before you click pay on the credit card maybe? At best, all I’m ever able to find before actually buying a ticket or coming right up to it is some marketing name for a fare that doesn’t indicate the actual fare class, and then use google to find the number of air miles to guess at what the airline will count as the distance. But this is hardly reliable if one is looking to make a run.

So how do people manage this? Do any of the aggregators (Expedia, orbitz, kayak, credit card portals, etc etc etc) provide this information? Is there some trick? Do you literally just have to buy the ticket and cancel if it turns out to be some crap earning (at least until the bank puts a fraud flag on your card for buying and cancelling dozens of tickets in a day)?