Hello all,

I'm thinking to join a Millage Program. I'm not very frequent flyer, coz now I'm a student. I'm base of US, and fly to China once a year. My question is which program is the best in terms of earning mileages and redeem milages to buy tickets. Appreciate in advance.

I have a few sub-confusions.

1.Seems UA's 5X fare is really suck for accumulating mileages. For instance, my UA tickets to China costs $1100 dollars, which gives me 5500 miles. Whereas if I put my miles to other *A program, I would get 17000 total miles*50% class discount=8500 miles, which is much better than UA Is my calculation correct abt UA?

2. Regarding using mileage to buy tickets. By using other *A programs' miles, say OZ or A3 to buy round trip within the US on UA. I saw it costs 25000 miles. Is this procedure usually easy? Any hassle? Could someone explain in details?

Thanks you very much.

anyone has any idea?

Perhaps reading http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/star-...post-here.html
and/or doing search can help, instead of bumping so quickly...

Thanks, I will post there. But my other two sub-questions are very specific. So I wish someone who had experience could help.

1.Yes
2. It would depend on the other program, but in common, you will need award availability on the flights you want to redeem for awards. Most programs have an online system to book awards. For A3, you would need to call Aegean to ticket the awards (EUR20? booking fee), and for OZ, you would need to call/visit an Asiana ticketing office IIRC.. or use the Korean website's online system.
Tell us the program that you are interested in knowing about the procedure so we can help you out better..

You can be wrong about 1.
For example the A3 redemption chart tells us the following about UA:
Miles cannot be earned in booking classes: O, I, X, R

Thank you very much. @snufkin

Thank you so much for your help. I was thinking about join OZ because A3 changed its policy. But I was concerning it maybe difficult to redeem my OZ miles to buy UA tickets. I mostly fly USA domestic and once a while to China. So I'm deciding between OZ and UA. I don't fly very often. Any advice? Thanks,

The best mileage program is United with an international address attached to it!

For many purposes, but not for earning RDM.

SQ would be an option, with 100% earn, but there will be no online booking for UA flights. AC and NH have good online booking engines. AC and NH don't earn that well on discount fares and NH has mileage based redemptions.

Thank you so much. Could u pls explain in details the practical benefit of UA? Thanks,

Two of the major benefits of UA for non-frequent flyers are

1. Miles never expire as long as you have activity in your account (even non-flight activity) once every 18 months. All other non-US programs have expire date, which means old miles will expire no matter what depends on the FFP, every program has different expiry date of miles, some are as short as 3 years validity like NH and BR (there are many more but those two are the first I can come up), you have to read carefully

2. Award tickets have no fuel surcharge, for programs like NH or OZ, be prepared to pay a hefty fuel surcharge upward to $500 per ticket, compare with UA, the taxes and fees are likely to be less than $100, many times are less than $50 (depends on how many connections and where you connect)

Also, you can book one-way awards on UA. Many programs don't allow that.

The downsides to UA are (1) poor earnings unless you buy very expensive fares, and (2) expensive *A premium cabin redemptions.

Thank you so much!!