Dear Fellow FT'ers,

I recently did an earning to reward calculation, and as expected 9W ended up at the bottom of the list for Longhaul India-USA numbers. However, as is the case with most premium airlines (eg SQ), with great products - this isn't surprising.
I have been trying to figure how to continue flying 9W which I still enjoy very much, without adding to my already excessive pool of 9W miles and have come up with the following solution. Please note this only makes sense to those flying in Paid F/C classes, in any inventory (FACJZIP) Just thought I'd share:

FOR ALL LONGHAUL FLIGHTS, BANK YOUR MILES INTO LH M&M - you get 2X miles for biz and 3x for first, if you were 9W blue/blue plus it would be 1.5X and 2X respectively. At best if you are 9W plat - you are looking at 1.9x for Biz inc tier bonus, and 2.55X for First.

Also, rewards are 160K for BIZ, 240k for first on LH (redeemable on any combination of partners - you could do oneway 9W, oneway AI or oneway 9W
oneway LH etc etc.). 9W rewards are 188k/282K respectively

Also, if you hold an elite status with LH or own any of their credit card products co-branded with DB, your miles never expire.

The downside is ofcourse no status, which is why in spite of knowing this 2 years ago I went ahead with JP and amassed a huge amount of miles. Know that I can't redeem them and they are approaching expiry, I am regretting that decision.

In my case, being based in India, I still get enough domestic sectors to qualify for Plat (well at least this year), but any sector above 2000 miles (basically INDIA-EUROPE, INDIA-USA) now goes into my LH account where I am under no pressure to redeem it.

With no lounge access on 70% of dom flights (thanks to Jet Konnect), and given that I always fly premium on international - the plat card has little or no value, where as the 400K miles I have on LH do.

Anyway - that a piece of advice for those of you looking to still enjoy the onboard product of 9W (which is still very good in spite of it not being as good as it used - better than most european and all US carriers IMHO), and reap good mileage benfits.

ENJOY!

One warning however - auto credit between 9W and LH M&M is not the best. Make sure you keep boarding passes in original and E-TKT copies till credit appears.

IIRC, with LH miles you can only mix and match carriers in one award only as long as they are all in the Star Alliance. So I would strongly doubt if you can actually mix 9W with any another partner in a same award.

And one-ways awards are rather poor value using LH miles as they cost 75% of a round-trip.

You can mix 9W and AI on one LH award. I did this earlier this year, but ended up not needing the ticket as availability on IT opened up instead using NW miles.

I have done a mixed redemption on 9W/LH last year. The only issue was I wanted to fly LH F and 9W C and if I did a mixed class I'd have to use miles for the higher class and go with a voluntary downgrade basically. So I went c all the way.

That's great to hear! ^