Originally Posted by aw
Having said that, if you plan to redeem awards to fly internationally, UA has the best group of foreign carriers under *A. I used to belong to US and the awards availability of *A partners was great in my experience.
Amen to that. Flew a PER-RAR-CHC-PER award trip on NZ with a 20K award through *A this past month. Seemed to get a lot more perks for gold UA status on NZ than I ever got on UA. Ironic, too, since NZ bashes its own low-revs through its Airpoints program.
IMO *A positively stomps OneWorld or SkyTeam, and it was enough to make me think twice about switching out of UA. But their reduced schedules here and persistent problems with sale-fare availability, as well as NW's more generous upgrades, finally sealed the deal.
I wish ST could be in the same ballpark as *A, but getting ornery members like KE or AF to agree to a single award chart with reasonable levels and without a ton of exception footnotes has so far been too big a hurdle.