Best option - Star Gold flying oneworld
 

I am AC Elite. I have to take a Cathay Pacific trip which is ~18k miles (+class of service bonus for business). Which program does it make sense to join?

Asia miles - has double miles bonus going on right now
AA - only requires 25k miles for gold (but need 4 segments on AA metal). 1.5x miles for business class??. Could potentially do an Elite Status Challenge.

Thanks for your help!

Elite Status challenge on AA requires that you fly on AA metal.

You may want to check whether double Asia Miles also means double Club Miles, which is what CX use to determine status. IME CX very seldom have Club Miles promotions.

It probably makes the most sense to join the FF of the carrier that you will fly most often in the future. CX Silver needs 30k mi but will get you lounge access when flying CX.

AA Gold will let you earn upgrades on AA metal and makes picking exit row a bit easier. As Gold the upgrades hard to earn and hard to burn, though.

Both would give you OW Ruby status, which allows use of J check in and a few other perks, though not much.

The 4 sector requirement on AA has anecdotally not always been enforced, but it is official.

No, also okay on AA codeshares, of which CX has many.

The Platinum challenge requires 10K EQ Points in 3 months; business class earns 1.5 EQP/Mi, so 6667 BIS miles. You earn 100% Plat. bonus starting with the flight on which you cross the 10K points, so if the trip is 18K BIS miles, you'd return with 2 x 18K base miles plus a 25% class of service bonus, or (if my math's right) 45K redeemable miles, plus Platinum status. Not too shabby.

There is a difference between Asia Miles (AM) and Marco Polo Club (MPC). AM gets you miles to redeem, and MPC gets you status within CX and OW. See Section 9.1 in:
http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/catha...-about-cx.html
18K in J can get you 22.5K Club Miles. You are still short of the 30K required for MPC Silver.

If you fly J, you can get 1.5X EQP if you join AA. With 18K BIS miles, you can get enough EQP to get to AA Gold, which is rather useless.

So long as your ticket has an AA number and not the CX number?

Ticket has a CX number.

I don't think I'll be flying CX again this year, though probably could fly a few short haul AA flights.

If there was some way I could get AA gold, I'd do that. If not, I'd like to do whatever will give me the most miles.

Thanks for your responses!

AA Gold comes from either 25K EQM or 25K EQP. At 1.5 EQP/Mi you'll get AA Gold with the one trip. As with the challenge, you'll get a 25% Gold bonus on the qualifying flight and beyond; the fact that's it's a CX ticket doesn't matter if you are not doing the challenge.

So you'd get 100% RDM + 25% COS bonus on flights with 0-16,666 cumulative miles, then 100% RDM + 25% COS bonus + 25% Gold bonus on flights beyond 16.66K cumulative miles (i.e. 25K EQP and up.)

As AA Gold you get preferred seat selection, 500-mile "sticker" upgrades, priority access, no checked bag fees, etc., so I wouldn't say it's worthless.

AA is one of the view OW programs which does not require the 4 flights per year. Yes, it is in the rules but at the moment it is not enforced.

CX also does status matching, up to Silver (oneworld Ruby).

It sounds like even though these are ticketed as CX flights (and NOT the AA codeshare) I will still get AA Gold by flying 18k in CX business. So the choice is basically:
1) Use AA - 27k (18k*1.5) - gets me AA Gold status
*Assumes they ignore 4 flights on AA metal AND give 1.5 EQP/Mi even though its not on AA
2) Use Asia Miles - get double miles promo and get 45k miles in the bank (18k*1.25(COS)*2(promo))

Is AA Gold worth the 18k difference? I'd probably have ~2 short haul flights on AA this year. Sounds like its not worth it and I should go for the Asia Miles promotion.

Thanks!

Think also about what award levels you might redeem the miles for. AA and CX have different award tiers so award tickets will cost a different number of miles. Also, AA miles are easier to redeem on AA, Asiamiles miles on CX.

Anotehr point is that CX has fueld surcharges. AA does apart from BA award tickets

Which has fuel surcharges... AA or CX?


My award travel will be on AA, is it a big difference to redeem AA on AA rather than Asiamiles on AA?