Wonchie

Hi,
I am planning a family trip next year to Asia and I am curious if buying miles is a good way or is there a another method. I am hoping to get enough points to fly business class. Also when is the best time to buy these points. Any advice is appreciated.
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PacificStandTime

If you are in the US; The Citi TY points are transferable to Eva. Currently there is a 80k bonus for the premiere card after 4k spend in 3 month (so would net you a min of 84k points) with a 100 annual fee. It's also one of the few cards that's 3x on groceries, so spend strategically (or buy gift cards at grocery stores). The Citi Double card currently has a 20k bonus after 1,500 min spend in 6 months with 0 annual fee. You need the Premiere card since the double cash doesn't transfer to Eva miles. Also the double cash card 20k bonus is ending soon, so you may need to bite the bullet and sign up for both and spend accordingly (but it's the holidays). That nets to at least 100k, which would be good for 3 upgrades to J, or one OW J award. If you wanted to buy more, you could always buy Eva miles, but they are costly, so this gets you a good head start at a fraction of the cost of buying their miles at 4 cents a mile.

PacificStandTime

Also, two other options:
1. you could look into Lifemiles or Aeroplan (though booking on SA partners has been scarce lately, but I imagine that's from the initial rush from the pent up demand) through Chase. If you have a stash of UA miles, they work too, but I believe the most expensive now (a recent TPE-LAX in J was 88k!)
2. Flyingblue seems to have decent CI J inventory (was able to find more ONT-TPE on CI than LAX-TPE on BR). It's kind of steep at 90k miles, but if you have a cache of UR points, that's another way to get to TPE in J.

commaspace

EVA miles are way to expensive if you are not buying during promos. Also the miles is subpar: expire too soon, way too restrictive (must have at least 50% of the ticket value), not enough availability, yada yada.

Pay cold hard cash and get status with whatever airlines out of it.

The entire Infinity MileageLand is a joke: website taking forever to load, no chat option anytime you need something you have to call their office, who will NEVER and I do mean NEVER pick up the phone. These people don't work? At least have the decency to route me to an offshore call centre speaking broken English.

aijung0807

You could also consider getting capital one venture or venture X credit card. Then you can transfer Capital One miles directly to EVA Air. The transfer ratio is not as good as Citi TY point (2:1.5 ratio. 1,000 Capital One miles=750 EVA Air miles).

Wonchie

Thank you all. Question since I am new: I currently have existing miles that are set to expire in March. Would buying miles and how much would prevent the other miles from expired,

Thank you

yjc281

In my opinion if you have expiring miles the best way is to transfer Citi's Thank You points (this requires the Citi Premier credit card) to combine with your existing points. Or you can transfer with a Capital One credit card if you have Capital One Miles but the transfer rate is 1:0.75 vs 1:1 which is much worse.
However, the redemption rate of Eva miles for the Economy Class is terrible. For example IAH<->TPE is 100k round trip for a free ticket in Economy class.
It is a better value to use the miles either for upgrade from Premium Economy to Business(40k Eva miles one way for IAH<-> TPE) or if available book a J ticket using all miles. (e.g. going from IAH to TPE would require 80k Eva miles one way for a free ticket.)

The availability of upgrades is much better than free tickets, though.

If you have a lot of expiring miles you can consider the above. Otherwise if you only have < 10k you can redeem for some magazines, sim cards or other small items. (mostly only useful in Taiwan.)

Wonchie

how would you do eupgrade. Where can I look? I am planning an asian trip for my family at the end of the year.

yjc281

You can follow the instructions here:
Infinity MileageLands- Mileage Redemption - EVA Air | North America (English)
https://www.evaair.com/en-us/infinity-mileagelands/mileage-award-program/mileage-redemption/

You can techincally check the availability of free tickets without having the miles but the interface is pretty bad as you have to enter the specific dates.
For upgrades you need to have already bought a ticket before you can check. When checking for upgrades, it will either say available or waitlist, if there is a waitlist then the upgrade may or may not go through.
Alternatively, sites like Expert Flyer (a paid third-party service) may be able to check for availability for you. (with a subscription fee.)

I just bought for an elderly family member a Premimum Economy ticket and successfully upgraded her to Business Class round trip.
The PE ticket is not cheap but at least if the upgrade doesn't go through she would have at least PE. That was my plan. It worked better than I expected as the upgrade was instantly cleared both ways.

If you have Citi Thank You Points the transfer time from Citi To Eva is just about 1-2 days from my experience.

ad2wangnexus

Agreed with other posters that you should get the Citi Premier. If you can, get it asap as the 80k bonus is pretty much gone everywhere now, but you may be able to find it.

Then, transfer points from Citi TYP to EVA. As other poster stated, it took me 1 day to receive it in my Infinity account.

swhsu

I learn a lot from this discussion. Piggyback a side question here -- does it allow you to transfer Citi TYP(s) from two different cards to one single EVA mileage account?
Thanks!

hlee628

No. Rules from Citi are that name of the Citi card must match name on the mileage account. However, a possible workaround is that Citi does allow members to transfer TYPs to other members.

ad2wangnexus

swhsu Hello fellow Taiwanese. I actually tried this by myself because I was curious.

Since I last tried 3 weeks ago, I was able to send points DIRECTLY to my wife's account (not my name).

If this doesn't work, you have 2 options:
1) As quoted post states, transfer TYP from TYP account to another TYP account. Beware of expiration dates. Also no Rewards+ bonus either.
2) Transfer from your own TYP to your EVA account. You can then setup nominee within EVA account by emailing filled out nominee form to the eva email address. Then, you can transfer from your EVA account to your nominee's EVA account. Form takes 1-3 days to process.

Hope this helps!

allison168

Buying EVA miles is only sensible when during promo and only for up to 17K (1/2 of the miles needed to upgrade from PE class to biz class) each way if you don't have enough Citi thank you points or Capital One points to transfer. Buying 17K miles was about $500 U.S.

Dave510

Buying EVA miles doesn't extend the validity of your expiring miles. I wouldn't buy it unless it's necessary to make an redemption out of expiring miles. This is coming from someone who has a stash of it for elite qualification. If I was buying miles, it would be Avianca or Aeroplan, depending on the redemption.