Convert MR points to BA/DL/ or CO
Jul 22, 2011 | 8:15 am
#16
Join Date: Jul 2010
Programs: CO/*G, DL Gold
Posts: 61
[edit] nevermind answered that one for myself.
Jul 22, 2011 | 3:11 pm
#18
FlyerTalk Evangelist
Join Date: Dec 2003
Location: Not here; there!
Programs: AA Lifetime Gold
Posts: 34,994
Wirelessly posted (BlackBerry8530/5.0.0.601 Profile/MIDP-2.1 Configuration/CLDC-1.1 VendorID/417)
Yes; but if you redeem BA miles for BOS-DUB-MAD (with or without a stopover in DUB) on Aer Lingus, fees should be lower.
Originally Posted by chernomorez
So if you use BA award to fly, say BOS-MAD non-stop on IBeria, would you still pay the BA fuel fees?
Jul 22, 2011 | 3:48 pm
#19
Join Date: Sep 2007
Location: Purgatory
Programs: Too many to list. Status is a half dozen.
Posts: 9,236
I had this dilemma a couple weeks ago.. But with the BA 50% bonus, I went scouring for available space on a South American trip with LAN. Found it all with stopovers, called up to go through the process and transferred the MR into BA while on the phone.
Then the wife ran into my office shouting about landing a new teaching job and while that's awesome, my heart sank. We're not going to South America this fall. At least I hadn't already paid for the award so no cancel fee to pay. Ah well, they'll still get put to use next year. I may just go for another companion certificate instead too.
Then the wife ran into my office shouting about landing a new teaching job and while that's awesome, my heart sank. We're not going to South America this fall. At least I hadn't already paid for the award so no cancel fee to pay. Ah well, they'll still get put to use next year. I may just go for another companion certificate instead too.
Jul 23, 2011 | 7:24 am
#21
Join Date: Sep 2008
Posts: 704
A huge advantage of BA is that you can stop anywhere along the way (though you can only use 1 airline per booking, which usually means you can only stop at that airline's hub). Another big advantage is that you can book roundtrip awards as two stopovers. I recently booked ORD-HKG-TPE on Cathay and TPE-KIX-NRT-ORD on JAL. This cost me 75k for Cathay (1st class) and 50k for JAL (business). Being able to mix classes in this way is itself pretty good. But the overall mileage cost was itself really good. A round trip in business would be 100k, which means 67k MR points. The same trip with CO would've cost you 120k MR points!
(MR/BA : MR/CO) - US to/from North & South Asia, each way
17/25+YQ : 33/32.5 (Coach)
34/50+YQ : 60/60 (Business)
50/75+YQ : 70/70 (First)
If we assume YQ is $200 each way (I'm not sure if it varies by class of service), then "cost" for the additional AXP MR would be:
$200/(33k-17k)=1.25c/AXP MR
$200/(60k-34k)=0.08c/AXP MR
$200/(70k-50k)=1.00c/AXP MR
As phonehome pointed out, Biz is the best value as you're "buying AXP MR" (paying YQ to redeem less AXP MR) at less than a penny, while coach is the least valuable at 1.25c
Jul 23, 2011 | 7:07 pm
#22
Join Date: Nov 2009
Location: Yellow Springs
Programs: AS 75k
Posts: 1,523
The other day, ThePointsGuy posted that Air France/KLM was having an award sale to Europe for July/August. 25k/50k for Y/J round-trip!. They periodically have these sales, so you might want to save some MR points to xfer to them.