International upgrades: should I switch?
 

My apologies if this has been asked and answered; I haven't been able to find a good answer in a search. I'm currently Silver on NW, and will be again next year; I tend to fly between 25,000-45,000 miles for leisure travel most years. In a month or so, however, I'm going to be starting a job that will take me out of town about 50% of the time, so I'm trying to figure out what my best option for accrual will be starting in January. I don't have a great sense yet of how much mileage I'll end up earning or how much I'll be able to consolidate on one carrier.

The perk I appreciate most about NW is, of course, the great availability of F upgrades on domestic travel even for low-tier elites. United E+ would probably be "good enough" for my purposes, as it's leg room I really care about; I'd rather not do much more flying in regular Y than I do now.

The catch is that I don't fly so many miles that I particularly want to redeem for free trips to Europe or Asia; I'd much rather buy and upgrade. I really only manage to get across the pond once a year on leisure, but with NW upgrades are both costly (requiring B fares) and hard to get. Is there another program I should be considering that would allow me to use my miles to upgrade internationally once a year, without giving up too much in terms of domestic upgrades? I'm based in BOS, if it's relevant.

Thanks!

AA lets you upgrade with miles on ANY fare, tho for international upgrades you have to pay a $250 co-pay each way. That's still WAY WAY WAY cheaper than, as you say, the B or higher fares that you have to pay to upgrade on NW.

And I would think that BOS would be an above-average city for AA, since I know they have flights directly to at least several cities in Europe from there, and for Asia the main city for connecting is Chicago (ORD), or some Asia (like Tokyo) you can also do from LAX, and there's good nonstop service between LAX and BOS (I presume also ORD and BOS, but I know about LAX since that's where I live :) ).

On domestic-only flights you can upgrade with miles (no copay) or more commonly with "stickers" (tho these days they're actually electronic), at a cost (if you buy the "stickers" in advance) of $25 for each 500 miles of the flight, so for a flight that's between 1001 and 1500 miles you'd need 3 such "stickers". (You get 4 "stickers" free for every 10000 miles you fly in a March-February year -- NOT the same year as elite qualification, btw!)

You can upgrade with miles even if you're not elite yet. And through a Gold or Platinum Challenge (do a search in the AA forum on "challenge", and look at the "sticky" there, you'll find tons of info on that), you can get to elite by as little as 5000 miles within 90 days (tho it depends on your mileage AND fares how much you need, since the Challenges are actually calculated using points). AA uses Challenges instead of status matching...

I believe that as of early 2005, Intl Q flights are not upgradable with miles or with eVips.

I think it is also the case that with the eVIPs you do not have the co-pay, only with the use of miles on international trips.

Correct, there's no copay when using eVIPs.

If the OP will fly 100K per year for the next several years (or close to it) then AA might be worth considering. AA's top tier elites, executive platinum (EXP), are given free domestic upgrades. Domestic includes Canada, Mexico, Carribbean. EXPs are also awarded 8 system wide upgrades (eVIPs) that can be used to upgrade one class of service on flights up to 25,000 miles. The downside of course, is that these perks don't kick in until EXP status is earned.

However, depending on the routes, AA Platinums can score a decent number of upgrades - which they pay for as explained above. The OP needs to check out the stickies at the top of the AA forum if interested.