Which miles to use?
 

Help! Please help me solve this word problem:

Scott has:

American - 316,000
United - 120,000

Bruce has:

American - 120,000

Bruce and Scott travel together always.
Scott and Bruce are going on a trip using 2 50000 awards.
Scott and Bruce both accumlate miles on American through credit card purchase. Almost no miles are accumulated on United. Scott and Bruce do not accumulate miles by flying and do not fly frequently

Question - which is better, A or B:

A: Use Scott's United miles thus leaving enough on American for each person to get a 100,000 mile award and travel together and still have 200,000 left in Scott's AA account

B: Use Bruce's American miles thus leaving enough miles on United and American for future travel to cities not served by American.

I'm inclined to go with A since I do not anticipate accumulating any significant number of United miles in the future. Opinions?
thanks
Scott

if you use the United , the balance will be 20k, which under most circumstances wont get you a rt in the usa

take the 100k from scott's acct
and bruce owes him 50k

if scott uses hh points then bruce can transfer 40k hh to scotts acct
then bruce has a 100k balance in his aa acct and now only owes Scott 30k airline miles

...just a little more info - Scott & Bruce are married and it doesn't matter if one owes the other miles. I see the point about having 20k left-over United miles. Longer-term goal is to have enough miles for two first-class to India, which probably means abandoning United and keeping American miles towards that goal... Any other thoughts?

I don't have much of an answer to help you figure out your flights. Just stick to cards which you can apply to any program, like AMEX SPG. Also you might consider trying to get one of you over the 1 or 2 million mile mark on American. You're close enough that in a couple years you could do it. That would give you status when flying which means lounge access and the like, especially at 2 million.

hope that helps,
evan

ps so nice to see gay married couples show up in flyertalk..

Thanks for the PS. Unfortunately, my miles go back to the TWA (triple miles) days and then those turned into American miles, so I don't really have a way of moving to AMEX SPG. I'm actually at 813,000 program to date miles on AA, so getting to 1,000,000 will probably happen. But by then, they may raise the bar higher... Probably 100000 of those miles are from actual travel (back in the tripple miles days) and the rest is from credit card purchases or churning....

UA points can be used on Lufthansa for travel to India, with a proper F experience, no less, so that isn't too much of a justification to spend them now. The fact that there are only 120K in that account and that won't get them to India is a problem.

I'd spend the UA points now. If necessary, find a way to get the extra 5K needed to cash out that account later. And then leverage the higher balances in the AA account for the upcoming trip that will require more points.