Benefits of booking award travel from a high status account
 

Suppose that there are two persons, who I shall imaginatively call Person A and Person B. Let us suppose that A and B are related, A is of low (QFF) status and B is of high status. (I have a particular low/high status combination that I personally care the most about (B is gold), but the question is naturally this general.

If person A wants to book an award flight, then (s)he has two possibilities:

(a) book from own account

(b) family transfer points to Person B, and book from B's account.

I would like to know what benefits, either published or unpublished, there are for choosing option (b). From experience, I can hazard a guess at a couple which I reproduce below, though I am not sure the second is an actual benefit or was a fluke.

(i) Access to greater award space availability.

(ii) Access to Main Cabin Extra seating on an economy redemption in AA.

If the low status person books from the high status account, there may be increased award availability to choose from.

However - that's where the benefits stop. Any other benefits (access to preferred seating etc) will be dependent on the status of the traveler, not the account of the person making the booking. When completing the booking there are a couple of boxes where the FF number of the actual traveler is entered, and that then forms the basis of benefits.

Exception: in some cases Platinum 1 members requesting upgrades from their account for others will confer a their higher status on the lower member when it comes to upgrade priority.

To clarify this, the person doing the booking would see the available seats before putting in the personal details, so person A would have the potentially increased availability that person B sees when booked from person B's account. (keyword: potentially).

After this point, person A's status applies.

I have compared award seat availability from my own Platinum account with that of no status account on several (but not lots of) occasions and never found there to be more award availability for higher status for QF FF using the online booking engine.

Of course, it may occur and others may be able to cite country experiences (?).

Hence the 'may' see increased availability :)

QF state there may be such, but I agree with you, I haven't seen it.

Sorry, this is just plain wrong.

QF stagger award availability based on status. You may not be able to see this on certain routes which are in high demand where there may be no awards in premium classes, however a WP should see more than SG and so on.

That is why you should always use the WP account to search and then input the second pax's name (who should be a family member). You can also request awards to be released as a WP.

Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't (as a WP) - even with J9 C9 D9 I9 and no seats shown as occupied (based on EF) and trying 11 months prior. All of which is moot given the OP is talking about SG status.

I have always had success +/- 3 days of my requested date. It's the most useful benefit IMO.

With AA the 'increased availability' is only seen by AA agents over the phone. And it isn't on every flight, nor plentiful... But it does happen occasionally. Just an FYI.

Yes, you can request release of award seats as WP, P1. When it really mattered in my own case (sick parent in UK) QF refused to release the seat three days before the flight even with a near empty cabin. On another occasion it came through.

Whereas QF claim greater award availability, I have yet to come across the actual evidence of this.

If you have evidence please share - just stating it should be possible has me unconvinced...I would love to be proved wrong on this if for no other reason I continually wrestle with the merits of seeking to maintain QF WP as a LTG...

...otherwise, yes, absolutely, logging in through a WP/P1 account (just in case) is a wise default strategy...

SYD-BKK easy
SYD-HNL impossible

Many thanks, og..I was just wondering if anyone else had tried comparing an online reward booking between a high and low level status account login and thus had any proof of extra availability for extra status (beyond the ring and ask)...

I haven't seen any evidence of it as a WP either (other than the request to release a seat, which I have had more failures than successes but do occasionally succeed), although maybe P1s get that benefit a lot.

BA has extra availability for their Gold members but it is in economy class only and it is made clear on the search result that extra seats have been made available for the Gold member.

I think I was P1 the last time I ran online comparison scenarios and failed to find differential availability...

...I'm sure QF is better disposed to release reward seats to P1 upon request than to WPs, however...

I did a few different comparisons between a CL and a bronze account (see one example attached) for various routes (syd-hon, syd-bkk, syd-lhr) and could not see any difference in availability for the each account. I guess the difference for WP and above is the ability to put in a request to release seats.

http://i60.tinypic.com/2nv3qy8.jpg

http://i58.tinypic.com/21oyj3d.jpg