jobevers

I just moved to Chicago and my sig. other lives in London. I plan on flying to London about once a month, usually for a long weekend. At this point I'm more of a budget flier and am satisfied with coach flights, as long as they are non-stop.

I'm trying to figure out what Alliance and program would be my best option, or maybe it would be better just booking whoever is cheapest?

Thanks in advance for any advice.

GK1998

Air India often has good fares
other airlines with direct flights are bmi, Virgin, United, AA and BA
Kayak has a good feature to check weekend trip prices

nigelloring

That's what I'd do if I were on a budget. You may want to consider UA though since with their lowest elite tier you'll get E+ seating - 21J on a 777 can be very nice, with essentially unlimited legroom.

nigelloring

O shoot, good point. Forgot about Air India. They have I beleive a once-daily ORD-LHR service, and are pretty cheap.

halothane

I would go with UA MP if I were you. Multiple flights and plenty of rerouting options. Since you'll be flying coach, you cannot beat having Economy Plus. You'd be surprised how much of a difference it makes! With being a UA MP member you'd have the option of flying on UA, LH (connect in FRA, MUC, or AMS), or BMI. That gives you three carriers that you can earn in MP. You also have AA and BA....only thing about one-world is that you don't earn AA when flying BA (if I remember correctly.) What would be your goal out of joining a frequent flier program? You might also look into the citi premierpass elite level and you would earn thankyou points (when charging the flight to your card) PLUS your frequent flier miles.


Halothane

jobevers

Thanks for the advice. The little bit of research I've done seems that it's just overall cheaper for somebody like me to not really have any allegiance to a specific airline. The benefits of miles is constantly decreasing and the work it would take to get a free flight is not worth the extra cost of always flying UA (or AA...). Thanks for confirming that.

halothane

I think your best strategy would be to pick an alliance and then pick a program within that alliance to always credit to that program. Don't forget about the Citi PremierPass Elite either. Good luck.

Halothane

pshuang

Ignore the accumulation of redeemable miles (RDM's) for the moment. If you're flying to LHR every month for the foreseeable future, that's about 8K elite-qualifying miles (EQM's) per non-stop round trip. In 3 such trips within a calendar year (technically, you'd need 3 such trips plus another 1,000 EQM's from some other flying), you'd qualify as Premier on United, which would get you free access to United's Economy Plus seating. On an 8 hour flight, the additional inches of legroom can be quite noticeable for many people. You'd have to decide if you ever felt cramped in economy seating and if legroom would help. Premier also gets you preferential treatment in which check-in lines you can use, how much baggage you can take for free, etc.

In 3 more such trips in the same calendar year, you'd qualify as Premier Executive. That gets you even better access to preferential check-in lines, even more baggage allowance, and you start being able to use the Red Carpet Clubs lounges (RCC's) for free when you are flying on an international itinerary, which ORD-LHR qualifies as, of course. And Premier Executive members start earning 100% bonus RDM's (Premier members only earn 25% bonus RDM's). So let's look at trip #7 and onward: you fly 8K actual miles (often referred to around here as BIS, butt-in-seat miles), but you'll receive 16K RDM's.

While many frequent fliers (and journalists) bemoan the horrible, awful, evil standard award levels -- typically twice as many miles as the saver award levels to get much better seat inventory access, including last-available-revenue-seat inventory access on United -- I happen to think it's an amazing deal. If you stick with United, every three ORD-LHR trips you take, you've earned 48K RDM's, which is very close to the 50K RDM's for a free[*] domestic round trip ticket, absolutely any economy seat that United would be willing to sell, you can have it, as long as you put that seat into a valid round trip or open jaw itinerary.
[*] You do pay taxes + government fees; and if you book within a couple of weeks of departure, you would have to pay a close-in ticketing fee.

Or, every 4 paid trips, you've earn enough RDM's to redeem for a saver economy award from ORD-LHR. True, saver economy award availability can be tricky to find on international routes, but amongst international routes, it probably doesn't get much better than ORD-LHR for availability. If you work full-time and so does your SO, you probably have fairly strict requirements for when either of you would need to fly. But if your SO has a friend or relative, who'd enjoy visiting your SO in London, and who has more flexibility in when he or she can travel, you're golden. You ticket them, get the karma points, and you keep flying yourself on revenue tickets.

I have indeed found United to be typically more expensive than many other legacy carriers on various domestic routes. But I'm about to make it 5 times in 12 months that I'll have flown from SFO to LHR, and United has been reasonably priced against other carriers on this route. I'd expect the same for ORD-LHR. 2 of the 4 recent times I've already flown SFO-LHR-SFO, my revenue ticket was under $600, all-inclusive (of taxes and fees); one of those tickets was Thanksgiving week 2007, the other was in February 2008, and no other carrier was cheaper. 3 of the 4 recent times I've already flown SFO-LHR-SFO, I've successfully redeemed 50K miles for a round trip economy saver award ticket, for the same flights that my revenue ticket was on. I do work a fairly unpredictable time-consuming full-time job, but still was able to find well-priced tickets on flights with award availability.

I know a lot about United Mileage Plus; I suspect somebody who knows a lot about American AAdvantage could put together a very similar narrative to what I have above.

In conclusion, I cannot agree with your conclusion that it's not worth trying. But everybody's mileage may vary....

It's also worth highlighting that loyalty is not a 100%-or-0% thing. I'm fairly loyal to United, because I find that the benefits of sticking with United are worthwhile for my patterns of travel and where I am in life right now (cost vs. value received). But by no means is the loyalty 100% -- I fly a lot of Southwest segments where their policies mean that I get better value flying with them than with United. That doesn't mean that I have to abandon all attempts at mostly trying to concentrate my travel on United so as to milk maximum benefits from United's policies and United Mileage Plus policies. So, in your case, you'd get a lot of benefit if you concentrated 8 out of your 12 monthly trips onto United, even at the price of sometimes paying a little extra vs. other carriers. The other 4 times out of 12 in a year, if United's fare is much more than other carriers, by all means take the other carrier that month. But don't scatter your travel across a half dozen programs and end up with nothing to show for it.

[Edited to fix small typo: I was successful redeeming 50K miles for the US-Europe economy saver award ticket, not 60K.]

GuyverII

OK, this is the most knowledgeable post I've read on this board. Wish people would respond like this to my posts...

^

jobevers

pshuang - thanks. That is some great info.