Hi all,

Emboldened lurker here trying to tap into the wealth of knowledge that resides on these boards - thanks in advance for your advice!

My situation: I live in the SF Bay Area (more specifically South Bay) and travel roughly once or twice a month for music, almost always on my own dollar (although I often get reimbursed) - some common destinations include New Jersey (EWR), Houston, LA, Denver, Seattle, Omaha, Raleigh, and Boston. Thus I’m usually booking the cheapest non-basic-economy fare I can find. An important note is that I usually travel with my instrument, a drum that’s about 2.5 feet tall, a foot in diameter, and weighs about 10-15 lbs; as such, getting on the plane earlier rather than later saves me from having to beg a flight attendant to not toss my drums in the hold. Invariably, the cheapest and most direct routing to whatever destination I need to go to is on United out of SFO. Southwest is occasionally comparable (with more stops) out of SJC, but Southwest doesn’t do red eyes, which means I have to burn an extra vacation day just to account for air travel, which is suboptimal.

in addition to domestic travel (~50K miles per year), I also make one guaranteed trip to India (Chennai) every December/January (~20K miles), and occasionally one other international trip (~10K miles). The India trip used to be on Cathay Pacific when they were handing out lifetime Marco Polo club memberships at the insane price of $50 a pop (since deprecated), and those flights are now on SQ via SIN (SFO-SIN-MAA and vice versa). Doing the math, that’s a total of ~80K miles a year, good for plat, but my PQDs max out around $3-4K, good for barely silver. The key benefits I’m after are free checked bags (my drum toolkit contains objects that wouldn’t make it through TSA, and I need to pack performing clothes), economy plus at booking (helloooo legroom), and *G, which makes international travel that much better. Some upgrade instruments would also be grand, as I think I’ve cleared 2 CPUs in my ~200K lifetime butt-in-seat miles. More generally, as someone who thinks he flies a decent amount, maximizing my status feels like the right thing to do, especially given that I fraternize these forums :)

My brilliant initial strategy was to start banking UA Miles into KrisFlyer, which worked great for about 2 months in 2017 until most fares I book dropped to 25% accrual on KF. Now I’m back to banking UA (and SQ) miles into my MileagePlus account. Some questions...

1. An avenue which would probably put me in UA Premier Gold range would be to make the annual India trip on a 016 ticket, but that’s not something I’ve seen advertised on United.com (in fact, I don’t think I’ve seen a single SQ flight I care about available for booking outside of award travel). Does anyone have experience trying to plate SQ flights on UA stock? The specific flights my family tends to hit are SQ 31/32 (or 1/2) and 528/529.
2. Another tactic would be the PQD waiver route (assuming of course it sticks around for 2018 - another thread was inconclusive as to whether it’ll be around). Manufacturing the necessary spend is trivial, and I already snagged the MileagePlus Club card with no introductory annual fee, which also gives me Premier Access while i re-earn status (dropping from Silver to Member at the end of January due to my dalliances with Southwest and KrisFlyer in 2017). Anyone want to handicap the odds that the PQD waiver strategy remains viable both this year and into the future?
3. Finally, the open-ended question: am I missing something? As I’m nowhere near million miler status, I’m by no means married to United (or MileagePlus), but despite all the mechanical failures and inconvenient delays I’ve had, United gets me from point A to B the cheapest, and their stranglehold on SFO doesn’t seem to be letting up. I also really like Singapore and Lufthansa which are the two common options for getting to the motherland (although Cathay is also fantastic, and British a very reasonable second option on OneWorld). But if anyone has any other brilliant ideas, I’m all ears! Thanks again.

Kinda figured that would be the case...also UA 1/2 timings are such that net travel time balloons from 22 hours to 32+ hours (huge gap between time of arrival of inbound flight and follow-up connection).

SFO-FRA-MAA isn’t a bad deal at all (actually ends up being more palatable as it avoids the monster 16 hour SFO-SIN leg), but there is some weirdness with the FRA-MAA connection timing. Return journey consistently clocks in at 22-24 hours, but onward journey typically shows 32-42 hours. If I were traveling solo, no complaints, but I typically fly out with my parents and my grandmother, so shorter is best.