Hello, I am new to this forum and this is my very first post. I also happen to be fairly new to the whole FF thing so forgive me if my question insults your "FF intelligence"

I am planning a trip to NZ for my family (me, husband, 4 year old and baby due in October) for end of December. We don't have enough miles for a full flight but we were thinking instead of using our miles to upgrade our seating to business class. If we only use the miles for upgrades, do we still earn miles on the actual flight?

As an almost universal rule, yes you will earn miles on your upgraded ticket - but only the miles based on your original class of service purchased rather than the upgraded class (in other words, no business class bonus miles).

Your best bet is to identify which program's miles you're using and ask your questions in the forum for that airline -- there are various rules that will differ across programs -- such as the fare that you'll have to buy in order to upgrade.

If you're flying non-stop from the US to New Zealand, the only carriers to choose from are Air New Zealand and Qantas. Sure, American codeshares with Qantas and United codeshares with Air New Zealand... but you're not going to be able to use, say, United miles to upgrade the flight.

(If you were trying to upgrade with United miles you'd probably want to fly via SYD so that you could be on United metal for the long flights.)

That's why I suggest you mention what miles you want to use...

Cheers,
Gary

And welcome to Flyertalk!

WOW, I was just about to ask the same question but did a search and am glad to find some information as recent as yesterday.

I just want to make sure I understand: I have a ton of Mileage Plus miles almost all from UA (with some AC). I can't use them to upgrade a purchased Air New Zealand coach ticket to business? I would love to take the new SFO-AKL nonstop...

If that's the case, I'm surprised, since I believe DL folks upgrade purchased coach AF tickets all the time even when not codeshare.

Thanks in advance for the clarification...the strategy of connecting through SYD on UA might be the only alternative...

I don't know about other airlines but, as far as I know, you can only upgrade flights on United or Lufthansa when using United's MileagePlus miles. You can certainly earn more MileagePlus miles on all the Star Alliance members, but can't do upgrades on all of them. You can probably get better/more specific information about United in the MileagePlus forum.

Hope this helps a bit.

That's right. You can use the miles to buy an award ticket on NZ (I did that last month to AKL), but you cannot use the miles to upgrade a paid ticket.

I'm not sure about the post that you can upgrade LH flights with miles. I thought you could only upgrade LH flights with UA SWU's, and that on a standby basis. You might post on the UA forum...probably get a better response there.