Please forgive me if this is a naive question !

I have about 420k miles with CO and am Platinum elite. I've never redeemed any miles for any type of award. Reading through many of the posts here, there are many comments on how useless the miles with OnePass are.

What can I use these miles for ? Looking at all the award charts on the CO website, I assumed that I could use these to fly from UK to the US and other locations...is this not true ?

What sort of restrictions/issues could I expect if I wanted to use such miles ( I understand about blackout dates)

TIA

Please don't let this board's Howard Dean imitators convince you that your miles are worthless. Many of us have had reasonably good success in booking standard rewards with CO and partners in both first and coach. Among other trips, I've booked NYC/LON in Virgin Upper Class for a standard reward. The experience of others suggests certain routes are problematic, if not impossible. My advice is to play around with various routes on the web site. If you are unsuccessful in finding appealing trips as standard rewards, call CO and ask about availability on partner airlines. There are also ways to transfer a small number of miles to hotel and other airline programs, but I have no experience with that. To summarize: if I won a contest and the prize was 400K miles on the airline of my choice would I choose CO? No. But your miles are hardly worthless.

Unless they expire or you're in a rush to use them, waiting for CO's alleged introduction to SkyTeam might not hurt, since you're based in Europe.

And keep in mind that Delta (a current CO partner) has a very good premium class product, supposedly almost as good as CO's BusinessFirst. Unfortunately, from London you can only fly to Atlanta or Cincinatti on Delta.

I don't know what all the bashing is about!

I got a Standard award for a RT SAN-IAH-GIG, GIG-EWR, EWR-SAN on the days, that I wanted to fly.

Yes, I was surprised, but delighted!

"Forgive me !"?

OH yes, forgot to mention, that was in BF with favorite seat!

please share with us how you did this My contact at Randy's awardplanner service will soon be out of hair to pull out, trying to book me OGG or HNL in BF

Yeah, listen to the Pat Robertsons of this board instead. Salvation (or should I say, "redemption" ) will come one day and those pesky One Pass Non-believers will be stricken by the angry hand of God!!


[This message has been edited by BackOfTheBus (edited Jan 21, 2004).]

There is a special category for Platinum booking BF reward tickets. it's actually not that hard for Platinum to get standard BF reward tickets.
Upgrade is a different story. Platinum have to play the game just as other elites.

Your miles with Platinum status is probally worth more than you think.

I am a Platinum, and have been for two years running The only way I snagged BF seats to OGG last year was from a very helpful post here at FT where someone announced the new service from IAH.

Whether I or AwardPlanner do the search (both of us login as Plats), there is nothing on any Fri, Sat or Sun to/from IAH, EWR, HNL or OGG during Sept, Oct, Nov, Dec of 2004. I can't go during Jun, July or Aug, but I checked and found the same results there.

Standard BF awards to/from HI are just borderline impossible to get, unless you are looking for one seat flying on a Tues or Wed. I would just buy the tickets, but CO won't match the $1200 fares that DL, NW, AA and UA are offering in FC from the northeast to HNL.

Reward seats in CONUS are tough to get for EasyPass, but standard seats are always available on almost any route. For international I've found that coach seats are easy to come by at the lower reward levels, but first is tougher.

FWIW, I cannot recommend highly enough travel in Virgin Atlantic's Upper Class. This service absolutely spoiled me for any other airline!

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CO plat, UA prem; Marriott plat, Hyatt plat, Hilton gold, Starwood gold, Fairmont gold; Avis select, Hertz 5-star, all the others base level...

Buy the ticket on DL, enjoy the borderline FC product to HNL and have them status your 150% miles to your CO account.

I have some trouble finding standard on CO, BUT I have had great success with CO and/or NW/DL when looking.

Call the Plat line and ask the rep to look at NW and DL if CO doesn't have it.

CO releases a very limited # of standard award seats as the flights to OGG and HNL open up (11 months out) and then more as the flights get closer (say a month, but not sure). If your travel plans are flexible, you can (as I have) snag BF standard seats close to departure. Unfortunately, those who need have things set months in advance, you're probably have to go the easypass route.