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which oneworld FF program...

Hi,

as I am based in Germany, I usually stick to LH/*A since ~ 99% of my flights are with them (so 99,99% of my FT posts are in the LH section :) ).

My vacation will bring me to south america this year where I will be flying scl-ipc-scl in D and pmc-puq-scl-eze in Y, all on LA.

So now my question is, which FFP would you recommend? As this trip should earn > 10.000 miles, BA might make sense as I will get a trip to the UK for 9.000 miles there, right? Any other programs/options I should be aware of?

thanks in advance!

cheers

Ben

I'm not an expert on it, but I believe that in order to even gain entry to the BA Executive Club you need to fly some high fare segments on BA first...

My gut feeling is probably to go for American, but even there you no longer have the possibility of a Platinum Challenge (which would have been the obvious answer last year) since those now can only be completed on AA metal. You can keep American miles alive with one activity (say a hotel) every 3 years and there's even the small possibility of getting to lifetime status (albeit with 100+ trips like this one).

thanks for your reply!

I'm not too keen on status so this is not an issue. I just would like to make use of the miles earned on the trip.

That is about 5K base miles in D and 3K in "Y". Is it really in full-fare Y, or in discounted -- the exact fare code matters a lot for BA, as discounted Y fares earn only 25%. Probably BAEC is the best plan for you, however BAEC does not allow joining until you fly a BA flight on a premium fare, so unless you already have a BAEC account it isn't an option -- they won't open an account on request any more. You would have to take a BA flight in club prior to your trip.

On Qantas FF plan you would earn enough points for a one-way 600 mile award (so you could do TXL-MUC which is 300 miles and go via LHR, HEL, MAD and soon BUD). So the points are not quite orphaned (but almost).

well, i do not have an BAEC account yet...

my itineray is in D and Y (no discounted classes) so this trip would earn 9277 miles on QF. almost 10.000 which I could fill up...

but, I guess these one-way awards do not allow any stopovers so I could basicly only fly txl-hel-muc so beside some extra flying, there would be no benefit, right?

Quote:

Originally Posted by christep (Post 7119849)

My gut feeling is probably to go for American, but even there you no longer have the possibility of a Platinum Challenge (which would have been the obvious answer last year) since those now can only be completed on AA metal.

Are you sure about this? The wiki says that it can be done on AA codeshares as well. http://www.flyertalk.com/wiki/index....lenge_%28AA%29

Quote:

Originally Posted by number_6 (Post 7121573)

Probably BAEC is the best plan for you, however BAEC does not allow joining until you fly a BA flight on a premium fare, so unless you already have a BAEC account it isn't an option -- they won't open an account on request any more. You would have to take a BA flight in club prior to your trip.

Not quite true.....

Quote:

Originally Posted by BA.com

To Join the Executive Club you must have:

* a qualifying booking for travel in the future

or

* flown a qualifying flight within the last 3 months

To enrol, go here:

http://www.britishairways.com/travel...l/public/en_gb

But there has to be a BA flight in order to join BAEC; if a future one, and you cancel and then refund the ticket, BA will just close the BAEC account and you lose the miles. So it doesn't help the OP, who has no qualifying BA flight planned. He would have to arrange for an extra trip on BA, and it cannot be on one of the cheap BA ex-Germany fares (except for the I fares). BAEC would be worth more than QFF but QFF is easier to join. AAdvantage doesn't have awards for 10K miles.

Quote:

Originally Posted by number_6 (Post 7121573)

On Qantas FF plan you would earn enough points for a one-way 600 mile award (so you could do TXL-MUC which is 300 miles and go via LHR, HEL, MAD and soon BUD). So the points are not quite orphaned (but almost).

No you can't. I think you misunderstand how QFF awards work.

Quote:

Originally Posted by www.qantas.com.au

The number of points you need for an Award flight on Qantas and our partner airlines is calculated by adding up the one-way trips in your itinerary. There are no charges for stopovers, or for any non-flown (surface) segments. Your itinerary may have no more than 16 flights or surface segments. However, if the total distance of a single trip is over 15,000 miles, the trip must be broken down into sub-trips in order to calculate the number of points you need.

and then in the T&Cs, trip is defined as

Quote:

'Trip' means a series of one or more consecutive Flight Segments within an Itinerary:
(a) that does not include:
(i) a Stopover; or
(ii) a Flight Segment whose arrival city is the same as the departure city of any other Flight Segment in that series, (in this instance the Trip will be broken at the farthest point from the departure city for that series);
(b) not exceeding the maximum permitted miles in the Award Flight tables; or
(c) not broken by a change from any airline to, or from, the following airlines:Alaska Airlines, Aer Lingus, Cathay Pacific Airways, Finnair, Iberia, LAN, Air Niugini, Alitalia, El Al, Jet Airways, Jetstar Asia, SAS, or US Airways;

Of those examples TXL-LHR-MUC is the shortest and just fits into a zone 2 (600-1200 miles) award.

However TXL-LHR oneway nicely fits a zone 1 award.

Quote:

Originally Posted by number_6 (Post 7122960)

I can assure you this is not the case! I have a BA account and I joined using a BA flight in a qualifying class yet credited to QF. Needless to say, the BA account was not closed. In fact my BA account does not have a single flight credited to it at this point in time.

Personally I would never recommend the QF programme to anyone starting off as whilst it does provide a little credit for even low earning fares under most carriers, it in general has to be the stingiest programme in OW.

Quote:

Originally Posted by barking frog (Post 7122195)

Are you sure about this? The wiki says that it can be done on AA codeshares as well. http://www.flyertalk.com/wiki/index....lenge_%28AA%29

Apologies - yes I think AA codeshares work too. But in the past you could do it on any AA EQM/EQP qualifying flight (i.e. you could complete the challenge by, for example, flying entirely on CX codes).

BA requires 4 flights on BA metal.

depending on the lengths of your flights this might gain you ba silver if you can spare the two r/t flights with ba. if i am not mistaken any flights will do - and short cheap hops to london are nicely done. may be worth thinking about.

for pure miles, aa might be a better option but that also depends.

thanks again to all of you for your answers!

cheers

ben