Except if you want to redeem US miles on their own metal in Envoy to Europe" This "unrestricted" award level is increasing to 350K miles. US does not allow you to book award travel online on partners' metal, so I suspect that alot of "desperate" customers will fall into the trap of redeeming the 350K Envoy award.

Just booked my first award flights since CO switched to *A. Thanks to the ANA tool, a very easy process. Found the flights I needed, rang up CO, gave them the flight numbers, done deal. 2 people on UA, LH, JK and SK to Europe for 55K each. Now if CO could just get everything ANA can see available for booking on continental.com...

I have used the Websites of 5 *A airlines, & CO wins the championship by a mile!
1. COntinental.com shows us availability & bookability on any combination of *A airlines, while US, UA, AC & BD allow us to book only 100% their own metal. So fewer phone booking fees.
2. US & UA can't book an open-jaw on their Websites.
3. US has the nasty Award Processing Fee, meaning that there is no such thing as a free ticket (except for elites & DM Visa cardholders.)
4. CO.com is showing Low-miles availability from USA to St. Lucia, Caribbean on US metal on Feb. 20 ^ , which is a blackout date for US's own members!
5. UA & US both have some degree of the nasty 'no changes once travel has begun' rule :td: on partner awards. What about AC?
6. BD has generous rules but that excruciating India Call Centre (ICC) :td: !
7. CO.com allows mixing of cabin classes & high/low even on partner awards! Which is 2nd best to BD's allowing of one-ways.

All in all, I plan to start earning CO miles for my *A flights & use my last 25K US for 1 award, then Goodbye!

With AC you can change flights and dates but have to keep same carriers/routings, and changes cost CAD$90

Great info this is just what I was looking for. My Dad has a choice of 4 airlines to put miles into on a Marriott Rewards travel package for the purposes of redeeming for flights to Scotland and Ireland from the US this summer.

Air Canada
Continental
United
US Airways

Is what he had to choose from and it seems like Continental is the winner with this thread. They fly EWR-EDI or GLA and fly to DUB as well.

Not sure about AC but I know UA is out for starnet blocking and US is 60k not 55k like CO. I don't know if CO has fuel surcharges but I don't think they do.

They do not on reward tickets.

But they sometimes add incorrectly and the agent needs to remove them "by hand" when finalizing the taxes and fees.

Indeed, or it automatically gets kicked out in a sweep that they do after the fact. But as a matter of course they don't add them.

Isn't there one partner where the surcharge is a YR rather than a YQ and it is being added still? I remember something about that.

I just spent the last couple hours talking to CO and UA about a redemption from ORD-EDI-DUB-ORD

I was surprised to find out UA had the flights and options for my dates which were flexible at the saver level, whereas CO didn't have any at the saver level. I was expecting Starnet blocking all over the place but I was able to book and use some star alliance partners routing through LHR on the outbound and Toronto on AC on the return.

UA beat CO in this case and of course only taxes for UA on award tickets (same for CO I have learned.)

The major negative of CO is that they are oh-so-stingy with award space on their own flights. But as I said above, CO makes it easiest to book with multiple partners. Go figure!

This has been the case for a while, and I'm not sure why it would be a negative.

There are plenty of partners with good service most everywhere, does it matter who you fly on, so long as their service and schedule are reasonable?