hi. newbie here. only heard about mileage earning a couple months ago. i'm kind of confuse on this miles earning stuff and hopefully someone can help. thanks in advance

i bought tickets from LAX > CAN (guangzhou), plan to stay there for 2 weeks and then fly from CAN > LJG (lijiang) for 1 week. so my questions are

1. i bought tickets for my family, can i claim their miles or do they have to each set up individual accounts and claim their own miles?

2. how are miles calculated? is it base on the round trip total miles?

3. how do i request the miles into my sky pearl account online? i was planning on claiming the miles from LA to guangzhou and use those miles to buy tickets to lijiang (if possible). or should i join a different sky team member program? i'm based in san francisco bay area.

let me know if i post in the wrong board. thank you.

Have to setup individual accounts.

Mile credit based on fare class.

Usually take at least one week to get mile credit.

You'll want to know what fare class you're buying to CAN. If you're going in Economy, many CZ economy fare classes earn a dismal amount of miles (actually zero on most partners but will earn a few miles in their own program).

Miles are earned per segment based on your fare class, so you'd get the miles for LAX-CAN sometime after that trip, maybe before you leave CAN, maybe not. I'm not familiar with SkyPearl Club's booking policy but some airlines charge a fee of up to $100 each for short notice bookings (within 14-21 days).

Having said that, if you buy from Ctrip or eLong, the round trip ticket from CAN to LJG is less than $200 a person, not really a good use of miles in my own opinion. In addition, I checked their website and CAN-LJG is 10,000km each way for award tickets... for LAX-CAN if you buy one of the most expensive tickets you'd earn 11,632km but most economy fares will only earn 4,652km for the segment. Basically you're going to need more flights to add up to a worthwhile award ticket.

If your fare class earns a respectable amount of miles, I'd put the miles in DL or AM accounts, most of the Asian based programs are not nearly as favorable when it comes to amount of miles needed for redemption and they also expire if you don't use the miles within 3 years where the North American programs do not as long as you have minimal account activity. For earning on Delta, this means booking in one of the more expensive economy fares (Y, H, K, T, or M... G fares don't earn LAX-CAN and W and Z are premium economy fares)

https://www.delta.com/content/www/en...-southern.html

thanks for the info. i got the economy tickets, so i guess it won't be enough for a ticket from can > ljg. i was thinking of using the mileage from the lax > can trip because i don't fly much and the miles might expire before i'm taking my next vacation. is there a way to request the miles on china southern's website? or do i have to call them and request the miles? thanks again

It'll be automatic, if everything works right, then you won't have to manually request them.

But again, it's going to be very difficult if not impossible depending on the fare class to use the miles on your CAN-LJG trip.

If you don't travel much then I would be trying to put the miles into Delta Skymiles which never expire. Just make sure you're buying a miles earning fare class, which as mentioned above are few... also not sure if this will still work, but a few years back I bought the LAX-CAN-LAX flights as DL codeshares which credit 100% miles to Skymiles regardless of the fare class.