A friend just got this email:

What are the chances OW will match this anytime soon?

What are the chances that Star will include the upgrade that everyone wants -- SQ -- in their program? Only NH, LH and SQ are really competitive with OW for F, and AC and NZ for for J ... interesting that NZ and AC (which have the VS-style J beds) are also not participating in this program. It seems like half of Star isn't behind this program, which doesn't give much pressure for OW to match it.

Cough - SQ was one of the launch airlines in the *A mileage upgrade program. (As was NH and LH.)

Currently the program is available on LH, LX, LO, OS, NH, SQ, TG, TP and UA (except UA restricts some other airlines). So not alliance wide yet but some pretty good ones are available already (and have been for several months).

but was not the cost in miles very close to the number of miles needed for an award ticket to make them too expensive?

edit: on the ua site only c,d,y,b fares qualify using united miles. makes them less attractive.

Depends on the program you are using

OW certainly has been looking at upgrade awards. I seem to remember several staff at QF discussing this exact topic almost 2 years ago. The talk at the time was that it was likely to be limited to QF, AA and BA with the rest of the OW coming on board later.

Considering this was 2 years ago, I am actually surprised nothing has happened. Perhaps the plans were scrapped?

No idea.

And if it were introduced to OW, then what? It's already now a challenge to try to book any F award seats without planning half a year or more beforehand. And depending on the route it might be impossible even then. If we add more people to compete for the same amount of award seats, I fear I'll have to collect another half a million BA miles before actually being lucky enough to use any of them....

/hv

Sorry that I didn't know about SQ, it wasn't in the list in the quoted email, and I never use upgrades on SQ, instead I buy the ticket that I want in the class that I want to fly in.

Asiamiles does allow upgrades on more than 1 OW airline, and several years ago AA offered mileage upgrades on CX. So there is past precedent for offering cross-airline upgrades within OW, but also precedent for removing these awards. My sense is that OW member airlines compete with each other a fair bit (sometimes more than with Star and Skyteam) and use upgrades as a competitive tool. Which makes it less likely for a OW system-wide upgrade to ever happen.

But in other cases they don't compete at all, and use codeshares as an alternative to competing. For example, AA doesn't bother to fly to Australia, and uses codeshares to there. So exactly over which routes is there big competition between AA and QF?

They already have a precedent for earning and redeeming exceptions related to competition (the US<->UK exceptions between AA and BA), so they could make similar exceptions for upgrades.

Also, a lot of these airlines don't compete very effectively (for committed members), because of how hard they make it for anyone who doesn't live in their region to qualify for any kind of status. If I travel to Europe some years but Northeast Asia other years, but every year I travel a lot within the US, exactly which other OW airlines besides AA are offering me any reason to go with them? I can't get anywhere on BA because I won't be going in their direction every year, and if they have the same "minimum metal" policies on JAL once they join then not there either if I won't be going in their direction every year.

Most FF plans do not enforce the "minimum 4 flights per year" rule -- exception is BAEC which does enforce it very vigorously. Generally AAdvantage is the best choice of plan, for almost every travel pattern (earn/burn) but there are lots of reasons to use a different plan. I am US based but use QF in order to get US lounge access and to earn miles on BA trans-Atlantic. However Aadvantage is worth about 2x QFF most of the time. I would never give up AA EXP status for any other Emerald.

CX has a lot of competition with QF and BA -- more than with SQ, for example. Despite this CX offers lots of benefits to pax flying their "competition", such as true F lounge access at HKG for QF and BA pax. Contrast this with BA at LHR with their fake F lounge, making the real F lounge (Concorde Room) only available to those flying BA (and QF, thanks to the JSA), but not available to OW Emeralds. BA does a dozen different things to circumvent their OW obligations and to punish pax for choosing to fly a different OW airline and not BA. As an alliance OW really sucks and needs to crack the whip on its members to get more of a single alliance and less of a way to arbitrage self-interest.

Does the alliance actually exist (in terms of a member policing body)? Or is it just an agreement between a bunch of airlines (but no independent entity as such)?

An even if it is theoretically policing, is it independent enough to be able to at least scold BA (who seems to be on the "security council" equivalent of OW in that they seem to be able to veto anything!) when it (a supposedly "founding member" of OW) is the one making it less of an alliance???

Even as a fan of BA, I agree wholeheartedly with your sentiments (except for the 'really' part [edited above], because I, selfishly, like the OW Emerald perks, and it's something *A has yet to match .)

I'm not certain of the actual structure of OW but I do know they were the first alliance to open office, to handle OW affairs.

... Unless you have a BA AmEx PP credit card

I believe BA still enforce the 4 flight rule to make it up a tier or even retain a tier dispite a BA AmEx PP credit card. If this is changed, this could be quite good information to post in the BA forum.