Originally Posted by
brosephine69
Have been a QFF Plat (OWE) in the past, but now starting from scratch, living in USA.
Considering Finnair/BA/Iberia? All I really want is Domestic Flight Lounge Access. (Lots of internal AA or AS Biz Flights for work).
Questions
For members asking for information, to help people to assist you, can you please provide:
(1) What is most important to you in a FFP?
Reply: Lounge Access on Domestic US Flights
(2) How many miles do you usually fly each year & in what class? How many flights/sectors?
(<25000, 25000-50000, >50000 miles - <25, 25-50, >50 flights?)
Reply: Not too sure, new job, just flew LAX-JFK-LAX, Have an upcoming LAX-PHX-ICT-DFW-SNA in a few days, likely in D Class
(3) What types of fares do you usually buy?
(First, Business, Premium economy, Economy, cheapest)
Reply:Business or First, Class D/I
(4) Can you choose your airlines and/or class of service? Do you travel for work and/or pleasure?
Reply: Business/First for work (booked through Concur/Sable, Can choose airline usually, but have to look at price. Thinking UA crediting to TK for *A for 777/787 routes, and AA/AS crediting to AY/BA/IB?
(5) Which routes and airlines do you fly most often?
Reply: US Domestic All around, Always Biz/First.
(6) What is your home airport?
Reply: SNA/LAX/SAN/ONT
(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?
Reply: None anymore, used to have QFF Platinum (close to lifetime silver), but no longer live in Aus, so couldn't hit the 4 QF Segments.
(8) Preferred Airlines? Most common Airlines flown on?
Reply: I prefer widebody if possible, 787/777, Lie Flat seats when avail, AA A321T was pretty good too.
Let me know your thoughts. Thanks!
Since you mentioned AY, the AA and AS flights do both credit quite nicely to them, and it's a strictly distance based program for non-AY flights, at least as for now vs. IB and BA being segment based and xx tier points per segment based on length. That may be an advantage or may not, just depends on how your segments fall into their brackets.
AS: D = 200% I = 125%
AA D = 250% I = 150%
You need 45,000 for Gold (OW Sapphire) and 80,000 for Platinum (OW Emerald), sounds like both could be achievable based on your patterns once you see how much longer distance you'll be doing. But there's little incremental benefit of Emerald over Sapphire since you're buying business fares anyway. There might be some theoretical benefit for standby priority, and I believe you can access the QF F lounge in LAX with non-US based Emerald, but you have to decide if that's worth the additional trek over to TBIT everytime as well, personally I'm generally content with the AA FL at LAX. In JFK you'd get the better lounge in T8 (SoHo vs. Greenwich)
The only bad part about AY for now is that their award chart isn't great, but it's expected they'll implement transfer to BA this year sometime, I kind of look at it like AS's new award chart though, if you're racking up bigger multipliers than you would have elsewhere then even a bad award chart isn't that bad.