You can earn non-Medallion counting miles on certain fares on SQ. You can also earn miles on Malaysian, but only in First and Business.

another question about Australia
 

Hi,
I'm trying to help my cousins make use of their skymiles and I don't know the system all that well. I did a search and read about trying to get to Australia with skymiles (the consensus seems to be that swimming is the best way) and I have a few questions.
Can you use two award tickets to get there? i.e. one award to Europe or Asia and then a second award to Australia? If this is possible which routing would require the least miles? Which airline is likely to have award seats available? They will be traveling from Atlanta to Sydney and will be going business class.
Thank you for your help.

You would need to use two awards. Your options are:

1) A Delta / Korean Air / Singapore Airlines / Malaysian Airlines award to NE Asia followed by a Korean Air award to Sydney. The easiest routing would be 2 Korean Air awards - one from ATL - Seoul and the other from Seoul to Sydney. However, you could also use a Singapore Airlines award from ATL - Seoul via their San Francisco gateway and then the Korean Air award. If you really wanted, you could also:
- fly on a DL award to Tokyo then use a Korean Air award to take you to SYD via Seoul.
- fly on Malaysian Airlines to Taipei via their LAX gateway then use the Korean Air award to fly to SYD via Seoul. However, I'm not sure if Taipei is an eligible starting point for the Korean Air award to Australia.

2) Use two South African Airways awards. Fly ATL - Cape Town / Jo'burg then use another award to fly Cape Town / Jo'burg - Australia. I'm not sure if you can still use this award to go to Sydney since SAA has stopped flying their own planes to Sydney and is now code-sharing with Qantas there. They do still fly to Perth, however.

See:
http://www.delta.com/skymiles/member...info/index.jsp
for info on how many miles are required for these awards.

An excellent summary! And it illustrates how absurd it is to try to use a DL award to Australia.
SAA awards can't use codeshares, so only JNB-PER is possible (that is still 2000 miles from Sydney).
Routing through TPE requires 3 awards as the SYD award must originate in ICN.

An alternative is to redeem skymiles for an SQ award and fly ATL-LAX-SIN-DPS and purchase a ticket from DPS-SYD. Or redeem DL to HNL and purchase HNL-SYD. That is the shortest routing by far but only gets you halfway to Australia. AF and AZ used to serve Australia, but no more (you could fly AF to Papeete, but Tahiti isn't much closer to SYD than HNL and airfares would be much higher for the last leg). Too bad Air NZ stopped being a partner with DL.

There's hope for SkyMiles to AUS if the rumor being discussed over on Buzz re: DL/CO merger turns out to be accurate, and if CO OnePass survives that merger with Qantas as a partner - that's a lot of ifs. I have taken up the lack of an AUS partner with DL mgmt. a couple of times, with no satisfactory response. It seems crazy to me that we're left out of this market.

Someone must really have a buzz... http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/wink.gif

Actually there is a good buzz ... but not until June ... Emirates is joining Skymiles! And Emirates does fly to Australia from Dubai ... the best way yet to get there on Skymiles. Emirates was voted "best airline of the year", don't know how it qualified to be a Skyteam candidate ...

Thank you everyone for your help. I was afraid it would take two awards.

iflyual

The press release re Emirates says that we can accrue SkyMiles while flying Emirates. Presumably they are not base miles as the carrier is not in SkyTeam (yet). I did not see any mention of redeeming SM on Emirates.
Certainly, we should all hope that Emirates becomes the Middle East SkyTeam partner.

Starting June 1 you can redeem skymiles for travel on Emirates and earn skymiles for all Emirate flights (but not status miles as they are not Skyteam). This seems to be a very sudden move, as DL reservations can't book me on paid flights on Emirates, much less award travel ... they suggested phoning Emirates, but were sure that it does go into effect June 1!

Delta Points on Flight to and Within Australia?
 

In a couple of weeks I am flying to and all around Australia. My flight to LAX from ATL will be on Delta; however, my flights going to and around Australia will be on Quantas. I am Delta Gold and would like Delta points.

Can you get any Delta points, or will I need to get the points with AA, which I have not flown in a couple of years (no longer fly into my local airport).

I don't think you're going to get a reply.

Delta has no partners in Australia (KE, but no codeshares) so you cannot earn Skymiles.

If you're looking for AAdvantage miles for those Qantas flights, better make sure they qualify first. Not all QF flights earn AA miles.

delta and korean to sydney, perfect match or what?
 

i can't believe it, i was able to score two first class award from atl to lax on delta,lax to icn and on to sydney. all segments but one lax-icn for (1) pax is confirmed in business, will this ever open
after ticketing if it becomes available as the award is a first class award? what is the procedure since one can't waitlist for korean flights in first? this i was told.

also note business class award on korean require coach class travel on delta. whats up with that? Two first class from the carribbean to icn 120,000 each and two business from icn to sydney 90,000 each.

what to expect on these flights and was this a good choice to Austrailia?

I'm very interested in hearing experienced FTers' responses to this since a) I didn't think you could use Delta award miles to get to Australia by any means, and 2)210K miles per person seems very high given comparative award mileage required on other airlines. especially without guarantee of first class for both PAX on every segment.