They offer it to OW members since that is a published benefit of OneWorld

That does not mean that they will provide 1st lounge access for their own Alliance

It may happen, but it is not definite. Anything is speculation on what benefits a higher tier may offer and what the EK/QF alliance will give

Qantas may only offer Platinum members access to the Emirates Business lounges and v/v

I would wait until the new tier is announced and seeing what EK says will be offered

Still curious if anything is going to happen on this one in the near future... :/

I/O passengers are entitled to access to First Lounges. If Emirates wants to be obtuse about things, they can easily make that claim.

w00t, it sort of has to - given the provisional approval by the Australian regulators regarding the EK/QF partnership but as I have learnt with EK, everything happens in their own time...

I flew over 200k tier miles last year on EK metal.
Quite sure that if they do not announce something about a 4th tier soon, I will stop at 50k this year.

I think a lot of us are in the same boat. My tier mile total was something north of 760,000 for 2102 and given my relocation to the US this year, and the fact that there is no incentive to fly past 50K, my spend is going to shift to other carriers.

Ahhh.... So, you really do have a time machine!! Tell us all about EK, what is it like in the next century? 760k tier miles really isn't much considering where they probably fly now, sounds like you had one flex and one saver roundtrip to the moon. ;)

:):):)

Not sure if it is an indicator of things, but I have a lounge invite for the F lounge on concourse A and I am not flying F. My gate is in concourse A. (Just keeping my fingers crossed that its not a printing error :) )

Possibly because the J lounge on concourse A is still not open yet, they are allowing non F passengers to use the F lounge otherwise it will be a lengthy walk for them. That's nice of you EK, Thank you!!

The other thing that it clearly shows is that EK is not 'fundamentally' opposed to non-F pax using the F lounge. Maybe its just a temporary measure until the J lounge opens and maybe since there are only 4 gates operational, it would hardly overload the F lounge. Still very nice on EK's part. I am hoping that EK allows F lounge access when they do announce the Fourth tier, and at least today's experience points that they just might. Here is hoping that they do:)

Exactly. I don't travel that much at all. Certainly not as much as most on here...:p

I met a Purser on a flight today whose wife works for Skywards. He said they are now working on the roll-out of the new tier and its implementation. He mentioned the March-May timeframe as the likely point when the first official announcements are made.

Geez... that's a lot of flying and if you're not diversifying what do you do with all that mileage?

I'd like to think that you'd burn it, but you sound like the kind of guy who gets op ups so he can't burn his miles on upgrades, and has so many cash fares that you don't get a chance to burn them on awards.

I guess you could do the Ryan Bingham thing... "it's a particular number..."


I suppose if the Platinum tier had some sort of persistent reward (i.e. something that gives even after you've gone beyond the Platinum qualification, and consistently) that'd be good, but it'd be hard to think what that could be.

Which pretty much lines up against the first few months of the alliance (ish); if it is approved by the ACCC, of course (but EK may push ahead with its 4th tier anyway regardless of the alliance decision).

Go read the trip reports. :p

I think I earned around 1.1M Skyward miles for the year, but as you might guess, I earn and burn. Primarily for upgrading family/friends and as you know, redemption rates are higher than most. I was fortunate enough that last year, 90+ per cent of flights were in F, so no op-ups ;)

When we relocated at Xmas from SIN to the USA, I burned 300,000 miles in one hit (upgrading 2 from Y-J and then 2 x one-way redemptions in J) It was worth every mile and it saved a significant amount of money...

How did you not make I/O with those number of flights in F? I would have thought that surely this kind of spend (even if you do not manage corporate travel accounts) would attract an I/O invitation.