JHark

Here's the deal: The whole family is vacationing in Maui this Christmas. Mother has graciously volunteered to pay for Coach airfare. Naturally, as a US CP, I want to go First Class (from Tampa). I have many Amex miles, a ton of US miles, and virtually no miles in any other program. I see my options as:

1). Wait for the UA/US code share and use US miles to upgrade

2). Book on CO and upgrade with Amex miles

What other options are there? Any suggestions from the ever clever Flyertalk folks?

Time is running out!

PHL

Don't count on the full US/UA program being implemented by Christmas.

Continental has the best service to Hawaii. Brand new 767-400s. The BizFirst seats are second to none (comparing to other airlines flying to Hawaii).

You can use CO points to upgrade a CO or NW flight.

But that's 35,000 points to do a roundtrip upgrade per ticket. You have to purchase an H or a K fare, and even with that, I can almost guarantee you won't find *ANY* upgradeable flights this far out. They'll hold them back until the last possible moment. They changed their intl. upgrades last year (Hawaii is considered 'international' in terms of service). A lot of ticked off customers in this thread....

http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/Forum20/HTML/002880.html

So, getting upgrades on CO for your "whole" family at a Peak travel time to Hawaii is going to be very difficult.

gardener

Another option is to try for 1st class "saver" award seats on CO or NW and pocket Mom's cash. Use the WPAA tool to check availability.

http://usr.v7.com/wpaa/

PHL

That'll be even harder. They don't release the BizFirst award seats until 30 days out, and even then they're scarce to none. OnePass really stinks.

dhacker

I know very little about CO, but this 30 day release information is incorrect. There are BF saver award seats to HNL available way in advance. It may be true for some destinations or for upgrades.

[This message has been edited by dhacker (edited 08-06-2002).]

dhacker

You can also now check and book BF award seats directly at http://new.continental.com

PHL

[QUOTE]Originally posted by dhacker:
[B] I know very little about CO, but this 30 day release information is incorrect. There are BF saver award seats to HNL available way in advance. It may be true for some destinations or for upgrades.[b][\quite]

There are saver awards for those destinations, but they are severely capacity controlled that it makes it near impossible to plan a trip when they make you wait until 30 days prior to the trip to see if they feel like giving up some BizFirst seats.

dhacker

Sorry to continue such a detailed CO discussion on the US forum, but ...

You can plan a trip in advance, if you are flexible. I just test-searched for and found 2 standard (60k ea.) award BF seats from EWR-HNL for late April/early May 2003. However, there were only Easypass (120k ea.)awards available around Christmas.

You do have to be willing to adjust your plans to the available dates. I don't understand why anyone would have to wait until 30 days prior to plan a vacation around the available dates. Do they release additional seats at the 30-day point?



[This message has been edited by dhacker (edited 08-06-2002).]

gardener

In my experience seat availability for HNL on both CO and NW is "bimodal" - you need to book at the 330/352 day window OR at the last minute 7 to 30 days out. Availability other times is extremely poor.

NW uses a 352 day window (phone only, online is 330 days). CO is 330 days online and on phone.

PHL

Yes, at 30, 14, 7 and 3 days the folks in Yield Management start looking at the BF waitlist, status of those people, and compare that to the characteristics of the flight (day, season, etc.) to determine if they're likely to sell them or not.

Until last year, you absolutely could not book Europe and Hawaii BF seats in advance no matter what. That was their policy. They would waitlist you until those 30/14/7/3 day windows. This caused a lot of people to cash in the YPass awards for double the points.

With some new changes to the OnePass program late last year, they aparently relaxed that policy a LITTLE bit, but many people are still unimpressed with the standard BF redemption abilities on those prized routes.

[This message has been edited by PHL (edited 08-07-2002).]

JHark

OK, so CO won't work. I hadn't realized that Delta was an Amex Membership Miles partner. What are my chances on Delta?

CrazyOne

My boss did it with Amex points transferred to DL a while back. These were not for upgrades, though. He booked whole first class awards for 4 seats. I'm not sure how far in advance he booked them, pretty far, but not way out at the max. And get this: they didn't end up being DL flights at all. They were DL awards, booked on UA through that arrangement. This actually worked to his advantage because he wanted a stopover in SFO (allowable in the award). Actually, come to think of it, I think he had to settle for one segment not in F, but he took it anyway. Had to book through the DL agent, though, who had no idea of flights. He had done his homework and had a big list of flight choices in front of him that the agent tried one after another for a good combo.

Anyway, I can't remember now if the UA-DL arrangement still works, but if it's still in force, it may mean that transferring to DL will give you the option of UA too, although I can't imagine that would work for upgrading. I think you'd have to go the full award route.

Of course, probably the thing to do is go ask this on the DL forum.