G'day all,

I'm a relative newbie to the world of FF. I'm Australian, and my only significant FF membership is in the OneWorld camp, with Qantas. I have rarely travelled internationally; I'm much more likely to fly domestic within Australia, and fairly low volume.

Now, I'm booked to fly to Denmark next month, MEL -> BKK -> CPH -> AAR. First two segments are with TG, flight to Aarhus is with SK. Return flight is the same route with the same airlines. Obviously, the fact that I'm flying with TG for 20,000 miles means that I want to join a *A FF program, and I've been researching a little today -- with a great deal of help from these truly excellent forums, I might add!

My current thinking is to sign up with EuroBonus. I gather this is not the most highly-regarded program around, perhaps, but it has one huge advantage -- earning + redemption with Qantas, leaking across the *A/OneWorld boundary. This makes the redemption potentially a lot more useful, especially domestically. I'm likely to get some decent points for my 8 day stay in an AAR hotel too, as SK's hotel miles are per-day not per-stay (which is nice).

So my questions to you bunch of fantastic folk are as follows:

1) Does this make sense? Is EuroBonus the most sensible program for me to join? Remember I don't travel a lot but my job is changing somewhat, so I may be travelling more over the next few years, but still not heaps. Long points expiry time would be useful, as well as relatively good-value redemption I guess. It seems unlikely I'll be looking at silver/gold programs at least in the short term. If not, does anyone have any other suggestions for a better *A program for my needs?

2) Does it make sense to fly on TG with a EuroBonus membership, and then give SK my Qantas FF number, rather than the membership in their own program? That seems weird, I know, but I have a little under 40K points in Qantas and that's where I'm more likely to fly for the next few years; therefore the CPH -> AAR points (relatively small though they may be) might be more useful in my QF account than anywhere else. Or is this stupid? Are there benefits to accruing EuroBonus points through SK itself that mean I'm better off putting them in that account instead of my QF one?

Thanks very much in advance for your help and advice,

Paul

A warm welcome to FlyerTalk mino.

You don't say which class you'll be flying but if you are flying in economy class with TG then Eurobonus isn't one of the most generous FFPs to credit your flights to. You won't earn any miles if travelling on some of the cheapest economy fare classes. One of the best FFPs out there (in my opinion) is bmi's diamond club. You will at least be able to earn miles on most of the cheaper fare classes with TG.

See here how to earn miles with bmi's partners:

http://www.flybmi.com/bmi/src/html/d...earnmiles.html

bmi is also excellent when it comes to redeeming your miles for awards. You can take advantage of their Miles and Cash redemptions with their Star Alliance partners which significantly reduces the number of miles you'll need for an award flight.

There are also various welcome bonuses when you sign up - currently it is 3,000 complimentary miles to get you started.

You will get Silver status for this trip at the very least unless you are travelling on a V or W fare in TG economy (only 50% mileage but all other economy fares will earn 100%) and business/first will earn 200/300% respectively which will mean Gold status straight away.

Do pop over to the friendly bmi forum if you need any more advice on bmi diamond club.

Thanks very much, UK flyer.

Sorry, should have mentioned the ticket class. It's economy all the way -- sadly our corporate travel confirmation form doesn't actually mention the letter class so I can't really tell if it's full economy, discount economy, or you're-the-first-one-we-throw-overboard-if-we-start-to-plummet-into-the-sea economy or what so I'll certainly be wary of that.

I didn't actually realise Silver membership was so easy to get, at least on BMI. 16K miles seems very generous (and obviously easier for a low-volume flyer like me to maintain). Interestingly, assuming full economy my flights MAY just squeak me in for silver on EuroBonus too. According to WebFlyer's distance calculator MEL/BKK/CPH/AAR/CPH/BKK/MEL is 20001 miles. I wouldn't quite want to bet the house on that actually matching the FF program's own calculation though.

Also, I understand that BMI's points basically don't expire... that's a huge attraction to me. Redemption is obviously much harder if I don't have an Australian airline to use but with no expiry, then maybe I can afford to wait until Virgin Blue joins *A, if that ever happens!

Thanks again UK flyer, looking into BMI a bit further (which I hadn't) that certainly sounds attractive -- I think I'll go with them in the absence of other advice.

You may not be able to use your miles for internal Australian flights but I personally think that's a good thing. The best use of bmi diamond club miles are the Cash and Miles awards for intercontinental flights in business and first class. Australia is well served by several Star Alliance carriers (eg SQ, NZ, TG, OZ). For example, you only need to redeem 37500 miles and pay £255 plus tax to get a business class return ticket from Australia to Hong Kong, China, Japan as well many other Asian countries - compared to 75K miles needed if you used miles only for an award ticket. Miles and Cash redemptions really are excellent value.

I should also mention that if you have Silver status (or above) with your Qantas Frequent Flyer then bmi are very good at status matching from other non-Star Alliance FFPs. Silver/Gold status on bmi will mean you'll get an extra 25% bonus mileage on all Star Alliance flights so that could mean an extra 5,000 miles for your trip.