I know that many specific airlines (e.g., DL) restrict the use of their FF miles for upgrade purposes to only flights' bearing that airlines' numbers or their own metal. What airlines allow you to use their FF miles for upgrading on other partner airlines' flights? I'm considering where to transfer AMEX MR points and airlines that allow one to do that would give me more flexibiity in considering buy/upgrade/award options.

everything i've read on ft on this topic [been discussed often] has been none.....hope i'm wrong.....do you have any airlines in mind?.....good luck...

actually a lot of airlines do, but they're mostly *A and require purchase for full-fare tickets. CX miles can be used to upgrade on BA, too and DL miles can be used for SQ upgrades (maybe others, too).

DL miles can be used for upgrades on SQ? I've never heard of that. I thought they were winding down their relationship. Could you provide more info or a link on how to do that? That would be extremely helpful. Any idea how easy or difficult this is to do? I would imagine the amount of DL miles necessary to do this would be very high if the SQ upgrade amounts themselves are any indication but do you use SQ or DL rules to upgrade?

http://www.delta.com/skymiles/use_mi...s/index.jsp#SQ

Apparently DL miles can also be used to upgrade other SkyTeam flights Y==>J on full-fare tickets.

If I'm reading the SQ upgrade calculator accurately it looks like it would take 160K miles to upgrade a coach return SFO-ICN ticket to business class. Could that ridiculous number be correct if I want to use DL miles to upgrade an SQ ticket? Talk about a non-option!

Inter-airline (intra-alliance??) Upgrades seem like uniformly poor value to me...

In the *A (as alluded to already) one can only upgrade from very high Coach fare classes.. AND the mileage/points requirements seem equally high!

"Allow" and "price reasonably" are two separate questions.

You should wonder first how many airlines have upgrade costs on even their own metal that make upgrading worthwhile. Keep in mind that upgrading (roundtrip) uses half already as many miles as an outright award, and so if you have to spend a lot of $$$$ to be able to upgrade, you have to weigh the $$$$ cost against the double mlies for an outright award.

Meanwhile, the "full fare" Coach that you can upgrade on some partners with often costs more than "discounted" Business! (The difference is in restrictions, "full fare" Coach allows booking at the last minute, and changes at the last minute, while "discounted" Business doesn't. That's why "discounted" Business can be less, sometimes a lot less, than upgradeable "full fare" Coach.)

Seems today that half the airlines only allow upgrades from "not so discounted" fares, and the other half that alow them from discounted fares have ever-escalating "co-pays" that are required to use the miles for upgrades. And thus mile upgrades are getting less valuable (unless you don't need to worry about the $$$$ cost yourself) than outright awards.

I agree with sdsearch's conclusion that it "seems today that half the airlines only allow upgrades from "not so discounted" fares, and the other half that alow them from discounted fares have ever-escalating "co-pays" that are required to use the miles for upgrades" and that "mile upgrades are getting less valuable" . This is a definite trend. Upgrading with miles used to be a very attractive option in the past but now in most cases it just does not seem to be good value.

I certainly agree that the clear trend is toward the devaluation of using miles for upgrades. For me, one of the other factors to consider is that I lose any FF and MQMs/EQMs when I go the award route. I look at the upgrading with miles options only for very long international trips and it's hard to give up those high quantities of qualifier miles that can keep me in a higher status class. I don't make that many long trips during the year and my travel is now all self-paid so my options for retaining status are limited. So even though it is definitely a decreasing value to use the upgrade miles I still take a hard look at them. Keeping my Platinum status on DL, for example, allows me to get the PMUs which, believe it or not have saved me a lot of money on J fares across the ponds. But now even the PMUs are down from 6 to 4. So the trade-offs and calculating go on. But there is little doubt that upgrading with miles is definitely not anywhere near as good a deal as it was in recent years.

I miss the AA 25k one-way TATL upgrades - no minimum fare, no copays - from a few years back.

I haven't used miles to upgrade in a couple of years because it's become such a poor value. Thankfully, the UA SWU's are still reasonably usable in most markets.

One decent value for a top-notch C product is using a UA SWU for LH metal. It's allowable on a standby basis with the main drawback being that it's an even bigger crapshoot than traditional standby. That is, LH might have plenty of seats but decide not to fill them for catering or other reasons.