ANC

you cant really upgrade a ticket. Just check before you buy any miles for a business or F class award that its even available. If you booked a coach award and later had the miles to redeem for an F/J award and or if space opens up you can call and get it changed to F/J for a fee. If the award was on AS metal and obviously in your case it isnt, there would be a fee if you changed it 60 plus days out

CDKing

Economy Comfort on KLM & Delta, Main Cabin Extra on American, and Economy Plus on United (cant book with Alaska miles, just using as an example) are considered part of the Economy cabin so you can buy up with cash. Premium Economy is a separate class of service so you cannot upgrade to it. You would be exchanging an economy ticket for a premium economy ticket with may involve a change fee depending on how much advance notice is given


The change fee waiver for 60 days advance notice applies on all tickets (award and revenue) booked through AS, even if no Alaska segments are on the ticket.

uthornsgo

You said girlfriend, not fiancé, which makes me think you will have plenty of opportunities to spring for the fancy seats and blow extra cash in years to come. I was in my mid-20s not long ago ago and if I had only enough miles for 2 coach tickets I would probably book two coach tickets and use the cash on something else like a nicer hotel or another trip. At most, if I was considering buying miles for a nicer seat, I might do it for only the return portion of the journey. I don't mind riding in coach for a long way if I'm about to sit on a beach for a week. I don't, however, enjoy a long coach flight when I'm going to work the next day. If you were 50 and had hundreds of thousands of miles to burn and lots of money, then it would be a no brainer. But in your mid 20s, save the miles and cash and take that Europe trip as well. You'll have loads of opportunities to fly up front and besides, you don't want to raise expectations too soon and have her expect to fly up front each time you go somewhere. No girlfriend that gets to spend a week in the Maldives is going to think less of you because you saved money and miles in order to take her to Europe on another trip. And once that plane lands you will be glad you have that extra money/miles. Some will disagree with me on here but based on the details you provided in your previous posts, I don't think my advice is too off base.

Seat 2A

SFO777 has done a couple of trip reports involving flights on Emirates. Check out his reports and then tell us how you've decided to save a few more miles for that premium class seat after all!

fishywang

Personally I would only use miles for long haul premier (business/first) tickets. If you value AS miles 2 cents per mile, the 105,000 miles required for JFK-MLE on EK coach worth ~$2,000. With $2,000 it might be enough to just buy a revenue ticket and earn the miles (and with much more valuable elite qualifying miles, if you are into the elite thing). On the other hand, 150,000 miles for business worth ~$3,000, and you certainly can't buy business revenue tickets on that price, so that's worth it.

zipo

Miles are most worth it when used for long haul business class ticket

kaminski6

So the consensus is to save up miles? Does AS ever offer mile promotions like 100% bonuses and so forth? Very new to AS here.

eponymous_coward

Sure, but you have to actually fly them (unless there's a partner bonus going on, and usually those are out of SEA or a hub). Going to be a bit difficult out of CLE.

kaminski6

I meant like 100% match for buying miles

CDKing

no. There have been some 30 or 40% puchase bonuses but never close to 100%

I'd be weary of waiting too long to use the miles. With all the devaluations industry wide and AS doing a survery to try to decide what changes to make, its only a matter of time until they are worth less than they are now.

missydarlin

^^

It's hard to go back to coach once you've experienced the big seats.

You're young, just go coach and save the upgraded experience for when you're ready to upgrade from girlfriend to fiancee or wife

beckoa

Wirelessly posted (beckoa's BB: Mozilla/5.0 (BlackBerry; U; BlackBerry 9810; en-US) AppleWebKit/534.11+ (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/7.1.0.694 Mobile Safari/534.11+)

I vote biz myself. But instead of buying miles- hop on a few flights to earn them. Earnings tend to compound with elite status.

jona970318

Op, what you could do is you can actually save yourselves some miles by flying cathay pacific business instead of Emirates coach. EK coach costs 105,000 per person rt while CX business is only 100,000 routing via HKG.

Orwaid

Hi-

I can safely say that CX Business > > Emirates Y on the romance meter.


Happy woman on a trip with you = Happy trip for both of you.

kaminski6

No points in anything to xfer to Cathaway, 85k Alaska miles each...