Reward Trip to Europe
 

Hi

I would like to take my wife to Europe as she has never been there. Destinations of interest would either be London, Paris, or Rome. I currently have 50,000 United Miles from the Visa deal. I know I need to do the Netflix deal for 4K more miles and charge to get the 55,000 miles for a roundtrip ticket on UA.

On my Delta account, I have 55,000 miles, so I need to figure out how to get to 5k miles for a roundtrip ticket to Europe from the US. Timing of the trip is flexible I am interested in going when I can obtain reward tickets for both of us.

My questions are as follows:

-I can book one of the tickets in her name, even though it is my account, and the airline will not see that as a problem?
-Since I know these two airlines are not on an alliance, we are prepared to fly out there separately and meet in one of these cities and time it right (unless anyone has suggestions as to how to avoid that?)
-If anyone has any ideas on how to pull this off, it would be greatly appreciated, as well as the best time to go, maybe Jan-April 2011?

Thanks for your responses.

Ricky

You will have absolutely no problem getting an award ticket issued in your spouse's name. Everyone has done it.

Make sure you book as early as possible and be as flexible as possible on your routing.

jan-mar is probably the easiest period for awards to the cold parts....rome might be a bit warmer.....good luck...

Not a problem.

Well, one easy idea would be to flip the applications (have her get the UA Visa, for instance), so you both have miles in the same program.

united and starwood
 

you can also have your wife apply for the un cc get 30.0000 and the starwood for 30.0000 which you can transfer to united or other airlines and with starwoods 20.0000 transfer you will get an additional 5000 bonus miles

Except that starwood to united is 1:2, not 1:1, so not really a good redemption choice in general, even with the 25% bonus.

But the 30K SPG could become 35K AA which could become 70K HHonors.

Could use either the SPG or HHonors points to help with the hotel costs.

Remember, it is not all about the airline ticket.......it is also about free hotel rooms.

Why not go in Jan/Feb and get Envoy Class off peak with UA on a USAIR flight? It's only 60k off peak. Have your wife do the SPG promo for business and personal and transfer from SPG to USair and get on the same flight?

Really. Ain't FyerTalk great!

I guess, but it seems like HHonors requires a lot more points for an equivalent redemption, so I'm not sure that 70,000 HHonors points would be as valuable as 30,000 Starwood, unless there's some other mitigating factor.