Originally Posted by
pikarakiraowo
(1) What is most important to you in a FFP?
upgrades on travel, priority services when flying the airline, good award redemption rates, better award access, free - discounted lounge access
(2) How many miles do you usually fly each year & in what class? How many flights/sectors?
20-30 flights
Reply:
(3) What types of fares do you usually buy?
Economy and business
(4) Can you choose your airlines and/or class of service? Do you travel for work and/or pleasure?
Yes I can choose, travel for pleasure
(5) Which routes and airlines do you fly most often?
Asia Routes like Japan South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, Bangkok and CX
(6) What is your home airport?
HKG
Reply:
(7) Do you have FFP status of any kind in OW or other airline? What is it? Do you have any miles banked in a FFP?
CX Silver
Reply:
(8) Preferred Airlines? Most common Airlines flown on?
CX and JAL
I am thinking of choosing a program that offers lifetime status, would BA be a good choose for me? Thanks!
Do you fly BA at least 4 segments a year? They have minimum flight requirements on their own flights (or IB) to earn any status level, also make sure you're aware of the recent redemption hit BA has imposed on CX and JL flights. (devaluation). As of now QR (which is also Avios and you can freely transfer between the programs) still has the same flights at the old rates, but that may or may not last.
In OW, BA, QR, JL, and AS all have own flight requirements to earn status (there may be more but those are ones I know for certain).
For where you live and where you fly, you might consider AA, their redemptions intra-Asia are pretty good, but there's a big caveat. JL and CX are particularly stingy with partner award availability and MH isn't much better. Another huge caveat is most CX economy fares don't earn anything in AA, and a lot of MH as well. They do however have a lifetime status, but frankly it's not as good as BA's if you can earn Lifetime Gold with them. AA has no lifetime EXP or PPro option sadly.
For your travel patterns it sounds like CX is actually a pretty good program for you, but I'm not familiar with their lifetime program, if they have one at all. CX has good intra-Asia redemption rates on their own flights and tons of availability that partner programs don't have.