need help with status upgrades please
 

is there any airlines that uses regular miles to get a status upgrades vs the eqm that continental and united uses? ive been looking for several days and narrowed down what im looking for and have spent the past 7 hrs trying to find specific answers. basically i want to buy tickets cheap from places like orbitz, priceline, etc. and earn miles to qualify for status upgrades and not just miles for free flights and stuff.

Welcome to FT, raceroyce!

I'm not sure just what you're asking. When you fly, the miles you accrue count towards both award mileage and status. It doesn't matter where you purchase your tickets from (with the exception of opaque booking sites like Priceline's name-your-own-price), so you can still use those cheap fares to gain status. The one thing you have to be aware of, though, is that in most programs, status miles generally get reset on 01 January (though some programs have 2-year qualifying periods). Most airlines also have ways to achieve lifetime status using miles accrued over the years.

I don't think any of the major airlines mix the status miles (EQMs) with reward miles (RDMs). The reason is simple... EQM's are true loyalty miles by flying the airline, while there are lots of ways to earn RDM's such as credit cards, hotel programs, etc.

The not-dead-yet BMI Diamond Club sort of mixes the two. Once you earn over 55,000 status miles in a year as a *G, for further travel that year your status miles get added to your destination miles - effectively doubling them, enabling such returns as 625% of destination miles per miles flown, for First class.

T'will be sad loss when gems like these are gone.

mahasamatman- thanks for the welcome, you pretty much answered my question. i was just wondering because on the continental website under the elite qualification requirements it says that certain fairs such as industry discount, Hotwire and priceline.com do not count toward Elite qualification or mileage accrual. usually when they say such as it is just an example and not limited to those sites. so how would i know i the site is an opaque booking site? how do i find out which programs last the 2 years?

la_traveler-yah that makes sense, im starting a world trip from hawaii to europe then to asia so i just wanted to see if i could rack up all the miles possible to get a higher status.

Any sites that allow you to name your own price, e.g. priceline
Employee tickets and some consolidator fares also don't earn miles, but you have to ask the consolidator to find out.

Programs that has status last more than 1 year and have more than 1 year to accure for status, OZ.
However, OZ is only good to get the status, but not good to earn or use their miles, as the redemption rate is poor (require significant more miles to redeem awards), elite bonus is not much.

If you know the airline before you book, it's not opaque.

That's not the deciding factor. If a site has a fixed price for a "Major Airline" (without naming the airline), it's opaque.

ok thanks for the info guys