Originally Posted by hrada2020
Thanks in advance for any help. Here is my situation. I will be a 1K flyer with united this year but my travel pattern will change next year, less domestic and more international. I plan on taking 8 trips to Europe from Denver and 3 transpacs next year all for pleasure not business. So, I am paying for my own tickets. I would like a FF program that would allow me to upgrade into business class with the most comfort with the miles that I will be accruing. I guess my question is this...should I stay with United ( united biz class is pretty good) or switch, and if possible match status, with another program. For example, BA has a nice biz class and a direct flight to London from Denver...would it make sense to switch to that program? I have to do a connection via United out of Denver anyway since there are no direct flights. Looking forward to the input.
HR
BA may have a nice biz class, but be aware that BA has four classes, not three, so you can't upgrade from regular economy (World Traveler) to business. You have to buy premium economy (World Traveler Plus) to be able to upgrade. Second, in my experience you may have to book
way way ahead to be able to get those upgrades with miles! (Airlines differ
widely in how easy upgrades are to get.) I mean, you have to have booked most of those flights already earlier this fall for the first half of 2007 to have been able to depend on upgrades! (I can't speak accurately for DEN-LHR, because I don't live there, but on plenty other BA routes I've found extremely limited upgrade availability, as in I have to change the
month I want to go, not just the day, to be able to confirm an upgrade at time of booking!)
So IMHO BA would only work for you if you were willing to put up with WT+ in case your upgrades didn't come through. WT+ is more-or-less kinda like a mini-cabin full of exit-row-sized seats: A bit more comfort (tho nowhere near biz class), but the same service as in regular economy. I guess it's a bit like UA's Economy Plus except a bit better seat pitch I think.
Picking the airline that has your favoirite biz seats does no good if you're not going to get them often!
And keep in mind that in OneWorld you can't upgrade across partners. So BA miles would not help you transpac unless you wanted to go the very long way around (but then there's again the issue of how hard those upgrades might be to get). You'd have to use different OW partners depending on where you were going transpac and each one would need their own miles for upgrades. With UA, you can upgrade at least as far as Japan or Australia, and at least in theory (but what about practice?) you may be able to upgrade some other *A airlines sometimes.