Originally Posted by
jsloan
UA can’t put an exact dollar amount on the spending for B6-ticketed, B6-operated flights. That’s why they award based on distance and a fare class multiplier. Sure, I guess they could just accept PQP as the same as spending, but I was assuming they wouldn’t.
During the days of the Northeast Alliance, this is how AA did it (if you wanted AA miles).
I actually only have one data point to highlight because only one flight drew my attention to this (i.e. the others were all flights in which spending * 5-7 was close enough to miles flown to not notice), but getting ~600 miles on BOS-SFO (2704 miles) seemed a bit off, so I contacted AA about it and they explained that the value of that flight segment was reported to them was $90, so the amount credited was correct.
The entire ticket was BOS-SFO-TPE, issued by BR in premium economy. I credited the BR portion to UA, and received 6469 miles (i.e. clearly distance based). The B6 portion remained a black box to me until post flight (i.e. there was neither a separate fare class identifier on the B6 segment nor a fare breakdown between B6 and BR in the documents provided to me upon purchase).