Dear HKF

Passages miles are only valid for Passages partners - meaning, no oneWorld.

If you want to fly your parents out from NY, you'd have to use either Delta or CX only. Currently these partners have some great deals to offer in terms of reduced award mileage required. Call your PASSAGES service centre - they're still there!

If you don't have enough mileage, you can still transfer your creditcard miles (Citibank, Amex - though all HK ones only) to Passages up to 31st july 1999. In some ways, the old Passages was better - see my story below:

I had the same dilemma recently....I wanted to redeem an upgrade award on CX from LHR to SYD for myself. Since I have virtually zero miles in my AsiaMiles account, I need to transfer Amex membership reward miles to AsiaMiles account. PASSAGES required 100,000 km and AsiaMiles only 85,000 miles so I thought the latter was better. Only after I called American Express did I understand the logic.

In Passages, 1 reward mile = 1 Passages km. But in AsiaMiles, only 1.6 reward mile = 1 AsiaMile. Which means that everything must be multiplied by 1.6 if I wanted 85,000 miles. That tally came to more than 136,000 reward points!

So I ended up transferring 100,000 reward points over to my Passages account (I had a whole 420 points left there) which I will then use for my CX upgrade.

There is also a 'clause' somewhere that if you had insufficient AsiaMiles you can transfer and combine Passages kms to make an award but only if it is on CX.

Hope this helps....