Is there a 'best' FF program/airline?
 

I am in OC / SoCal: fly out of SNA / LAX - mostly to Europe, Hawaii, or Caribbean. I realize that my AA program is not the best since they offer all routes only with multiple stopovers (my life is short) and with many restrictions. Should I get United? other?

Hi Skywalker22,

I would guess that the answer is "yes" there is a best program for you. Based specifically on your priorities and situation. Figuring out what it is, is another question! ;)

I would guess that the experts here in the FlyerTalk Forums would be likely to proffer some advice if you shared a bit more about your situation. Are you hoping for award flights? Are you more interested in upgrades? How much do you fly?

Though I am not an expert myself, I did find a summary discription of some of the top programs that is going to be in the April issue of Conde Nast Traveler that was written by one of FT's experts gleff. I hope you find it useful (see link below.)

http://www.concierge.com/cntraveler/articles/502453

Epiflyer
 

Thank you for the response. My situation: I want to acquire miles but am probably not going to do 'mileage runs' if I understand them right: lots of extra travel without real destination - I don't have the time for that. I travel mostly just for vacation; so no paid travel for business. I am a newbie here and trying to figure out the system so I can afford more travel.
The concierge article is very informative. Thank you. Given the comparative (dis)advantages of each program though I still can't quite decide whether I should get an additional program, eg. Starwood; Capital One Venture (anybody have any experience with those?), or stick with AA.

I too am not an expert, but if your main goal is to accumulate miles, I would consider the head start you already have in your existing programs.

If there's not much there already, I agree with Skywalker - the link he provided has some great info.

Wirelessly posted (BlackBerry8703e/4.1.0 Profile/MIDP-2.0 Configuration/CLDC-1.1 VendorID/104)

Huh? AA flies nonstop from LAX to four different Hawaiian islands; nonstop from LAX to SJU and MIA, from which AA offers connections to numerous Caribbean destinations; and nonstop from LAX to LHR. AA's partner, Air Tahiti Nui, flies nonstop from LAX to Paris.

AA offers one-way awards for as low as 20,000 miles in coach to or from Europe, with a free stopover permitted -- if desired -- at a North American gateway city. So, for example, if you were to fly nonstop on an award ticket from London or Paris to LAX, you could stop over at LAX for a day or for several months, and then continue on to Hawaii for no additional mileage charge!

What do you find lacking in these offerings?

re best ff program
 

Are you planning on traveling in F,C, or economy? Also do you plan on becoming a million miler?

Since you want to acquire miles I would take a close look at the AA Platinum Challenge.

After 10K EQPs earned during a challenge you will get double miles on the rest of your flights. Sign up for AA Citibank credit cards, Shop at the AA online store, take surveys.

All airlines have the latter part of that advice, but only AA has a challenge.

One advice: try to pick a program and stick to it. Bonuses can rack up the miles, but if you spread your miles around, you often will not get the benefits of the bonuses, etc. So if you stick with AA, get an AA card, put AA on your car rentals, hotels, etc. Of course, there may come a time in the future when you need to change programs, but generally speaking better to stick to one.

Second is to look at the alliance that that airline belongs to. Where do you want to fly? What are the alliance members that fly to that destination?

I'm a member of AA, AAD, AA Dining, etc. but I haven't seen anything about the challenge. Can you direct me to that promo? Thanks.

DH and I also fly only for vacation and our goal is miles for award travel. A big consideration is the ease of redemption. We've had very good experiences with award travel on American, average experience with US Air/America West. We seldom fly Delta but the buzz on FT is that their redemption is poor.

guv:
 

guv: thank you for the good info; you are clearly more experienced than I am. The way you describe it sounds good; I just have not come across those offers yet. When I fly, it is often at short notice, less than one month ahead of travel date. Are the offers you describe more likely to occur with long term planning? Again, my goal is to learn more so I can afford more travel. How do I get a multiweek stopover? I actually just wanted to plan the following trip:
LAX-BOS (1-WAY) WITH 3-DAY STOP - THEN: BOS-FLR (10-DAY STOP); FLR-MUC (6-DAY STOP) AND BACK: MUC-LAX. While I can fly AA for pay on this route, it is not available for miles, and for pay it costs $3500. Any suggestions?

jpmmracing
 

I just want to acquire as many miles as possible to afford more frequent vacation travel. I don't have any paid business travel but my miles come mostly from ~$100K credit card charges. Thanks to an uptick in recent travel (due to a cancer diagnosis and some freed up time) I used up all my 900K miles with AA and now need to actually start paying for my flights which I can't well afford. I am fine traveling economy as long as I can travel at all.

These types of debates will be very ambiguous for you will get opinions from many people who will be at opposite ends of the spectrum. Educate yourself after some feedback here and report back what your thoughts are.

That's a good point and I have been doing just that for the past 10+ years but ideally would have a bit more flexibility than AA offers me (I have not been able to get the amazing non-stop connections guv talks about). I am wondering whether I should get an additional program, eg. Starwood; Capital One Venture; Schwab (anybody have any experience with those?), or stick with AA. How well do those other programs work? Do they effectively increase flexibility? Is it easy enough to redeem miles? I have read online a number of dreadful reviews of the Starwood program in terms of customer service but have also read that lots of people have it - not sure what to do.

Gladly!

It's right here.

Get the AMEX Starwood Card. Good sign up bonus. Transfer 20000 points to AA and you will get a 5000 miles bonus into you AA account.

Skywalker,

The Starwood AMEX card gives you a mileage bonus (an extra 5k miles for every 20k points transferred) and flexibility since the points can be transferred to some airlines at 1:1 ratio (I think United is 2 for 1). With your annual spending that could be a lot of tickets!! The down side is not all vendors take AMEX. I haven't had any problems with their customer service but YMMV.

The Schwab card (at least the only one I know about) gives you 2% cash back, not miles and doesn't charge foreign exchange fees. These are the only 2 cards I use - when I'm not churning.

Also, you mentioned 900K AA miles, that means you should be close to the million mile mark. This would give you lifetime gold status which lets you pick the exit row seats and no charges for your first 2 checked bags. If you are close, you might want to make that milestone before switching to another airline.

Sorry to hear about the diagnosis. My best wishes to you and your loves ones.

I'm not sure if any of AA's partners flies into FLR; but both BA and IB fly into PSA, which is about an hour away from Florence.

AA's regular, all-partner awards only permit a stopover at a North American gateway; no stopovers are permitted elsewhere. So you could conceivably do a one-way LAX-BOS-PSA (via LHR or MAD), stopping over in BOS; then a one-way intra-Europe award PSA-MUC (probably via LHR or MAD, again); and then MUC-LAX via some connecting point. (If you fly from Europe nonstop to LAX on the award, you could treat LAX as your gateway stopover, and then continue on from there weeks or months later to another North American destination.) You can search oneworld schedules at this site:


http://www.travelsked.com/itdpda/html.asp?custcode=ONW

As an alternative, you could look into using a distance-based oneworld award, which permits stopovers at all connecting points, but requires that you use at least two oneworld partners other than AA (BA and IB would qualify). But, depending on the class of service and routing, the oneworld award might cost more miles than three one-way awards. You will need to price it each way, assuming that you can find award seats. There is an excellent sticky in the AA forum explaining the rules and award levels for oneworld awards.

gold?
 

Mellie: Thank you for the good wishes and your good comments. I spent the 900K miles on travel - does that still count then for lifetime Gold status? Or does one get the status only when one has 1 million in the bank?

Yes to first question. No to second question.

Log in to your AA account, and see your "Program to Date Miles". That is what matters in qualifying for Gold, irrespective of your current "Total Available Award Mileage" (account balance).

Best wishes for a full recovery, skywalker22.

AA special offers?
 

WOW! My first post here! Just wondering what that AA Platinum Challenge is and a link to it. Also, just stumbled onto a bonus offer when buying additional miles for my AA account...looks like a good deal....does anyone have any thoughts on either of these? :)

http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/ameri...-platinum.html

Buying miles makes sense under some circumstances.

It sure depends on where you want to go, but for worldwide travel I suggest Miles & More, as you will be able to collect miles with all airlines of Star Alliance, incl. US, UA, CO, and many more (majors). Good luck!

Thanks for the link!

Now, about my other question.....AA has a deal for purchasing 40K miles for $1,000 with a bonus of 15K miles so 55K miles for $1,000.....I'd only need 5K miles more to get a RT to Europe during high season....sounds pretty good. However, you all know how to play the mileage game better than I so wondering if this is a good deal. Since I'm a newbie, please take it slow and spell it all out for me, ok? Vinaka!

That comes out to 0.018 a mile which isn't bad but you shouldn't be using miles purchase to fund a trip. Generally you are not getting a good ROI for it beyond that trip. If that is the only trip you do in a year, no biggie. If not, purchasing the ticket plus other regularly scheduled flights through the year could give your extra bennies like upgrades and such.

I totally agree with this, if you are near 1MM with AA you should probably concentrate on getting lifetime status with AA. This way you will always have this "in the bank" and can then possibly concentrate on another airline if you need to. Lifetime status is something that I would go for if I were close to that goal.

You have come across the best resource on the internet to answer your questions here at FT and you will get a huge amount of useful information if you post questions with specific information and respond to questions from members.

I think I know very little compared to most people on this site about travel and I probably would rank in the top 1/10th of 1% of the traveling public. That may give you an idea as to the knowledge base of the members of FT.

Good luck.

I have a question about the AA FFP. How long on average would it take to earn a million miles. I am 23 now, but recently read in article about FFM, and there value and I have decided it is a great thing to get started on while I'm young. I mainly fly out of STL or KCI, and can't decide on an alliance FFP to join. I was thinking Star Alliance, but I'm confused and a little unsure about making a commitment. I know the FFP's value Loyalty and so I would like to start building miles now. This 'lifetime gold' status is something that intrigues me, and I would love to start accumulating miles now. Any advice on choosing a FFP would be much appreciated. On a final note, I am probably going to get an SPG AmEx card, because of the great value it also offers. Are there similar status's you can reach with that card? Thanks for everyone's help, and good luck with your battle skywalker.

-BW

Awesome, I'm going to sign up myself.

I think there's a thread on the AA forum where people shared how long it took for them to reach 1M. I've done very little business travel so the vast majority of my million miles on AA is from credit cards and it took about 15 years. About 300K+ from churning (churning is being curtailed but if you don't already have cards with AA you can still get at least 1 bonus - see the Other Credit Cards Forum for more info) and probably 500K+ miles for transferring points from Starwood - earned using the Starwood Amex. I wish I were 23 again and had a resource like Flyer Talk - I'd have made that 1M mark a lot faster!

Regarding which FFP - I concentrated on AA because they had a hub where I lived when I started collecting miles. Now I'm hooked on the benefits so I don't know enough about the other airlines to advise you. But there are plenty of others here who will.

Great, thanks Mellie! So the dollars I spend using a credit card can turn into miles towards the 1M mark. Good info to know, and I appreciate the advice. Starwood AmEx also seems like a great deal and you mention that you transferred points from Starwood into your mileage? FT has been great to me so far, and I look forward to learning more, and then helping others! On my way to a 1M! haha! :D

It is hard to say who is the best, but is very easy to say who is the worst!

FYI - AA is the only airline that counts credit card charges and mile transfers towards the 1M mark. All other airlines do not do this.

What would one use miles purchased for other than to fund a trip? Upgrades?

depending on the FF program miles can be used for hotel stays, club memberships, etc.

see Laid off and living on airline points

Okay, let's try to ask this here...

This is my situation: in the coming years I will have to commute between Zurich and Bangkok several times a year. I'm a Switzerland-based student so I don't mind having layovers if the fare gets cheaper.
This is why I turn to you: What FFP shall I choose? This is what I was looking at:
1. Qatar Airways Privilege Club (IMO very cheap airfares, great service, rewarding FFP)
2. Swiss&Lufthansa Miles&More (vast network, high flexibility, possibility of earning miles by credit card, but the airfares are rather expensive in comparison to QA)

What is your opinion on that? What would be the best FF membership for me?

Can nobody help me? Just US based people here?