Air Miles...who should I go with?

[Ev0]

Yea, I got £100 off two return tickets last year using about a third of the miles I'd earned flying to LA the year before. Pretty decent.

We managed 2 flights to Washington/back from New York for about £250 each using up about three quarters of our points.

 

[sammo62]

If you had done those 6 trips with UA/CO/US, you'd have 50,000+ miles and Star Alliance Gold status as well as the extra benefits with the status of the airline, i.e. Continental Gold, United Premier Executive, US Gold.

Extra free luggage allowance, lounge access, upgrades, priority on waitlists etc. With American on discount fares it's a struggle to get any kind of worthwhile status!

I flew for free last time (+£120 taxes), and still have 20k miles on my account. It's not too bad to be honest. The reason I flew AA was because they were the only airline who fly right into the tiny airport in the town I live - much easier than taking UA to Indianapolis or wherever their nearest hub is.

I'm not saying AA are a good airline, they've done plenty of things to annoy me (switching the 777 for an old 767 with no TVs at the last minute being the worst offense), but for what I need they are OK. Flying for free was very nice as I had a ton of stuff to pay for with my visa.

 

[Windle]

Scuzi, BA supports Avios as standard. You can add your Avios card to your booking, or else if you sign up to BA Executive Club and register your Avios card it's automatic. Oh and my AA booking is showing up in my British Airways booking as it's a series of drop-down flights so I'm earning Avios miles on the AA flights to boot.

 

[Bes]

How many miles are you thinking of flying? If you are planning on around 50k, I'd suggest sticking with Star Alliance as you can get Star Alliance Gold status which has excellent benefits like lounge access worldwide (they have more and better lounges than anyone else), excellent baggage allowances and priority on waitlists in the event of irrgeular operations.

Great post Scuzi,...

One thing worth mentioning: To use an example from my personal experience... I used to do a lot of consulting for a telco in South Africa and was a regular LHR-JNB flier. I usually used South African Airways, and collected points on my Lufthansa Miles & More card.

What I did not realise is that I would only often be credited 1/2 or 1/4 miles on Economy tickets in at least one direction. This meant flying A LOT got me no status and very few miles. By contrast, I switched from Lufthansa M&M to BMI Diamond Club a couple of years ago, and was Silver by March doing less miles.... so choose your card carefully. If you decide to go Star and you are chasing status (not redemptions), Adria has a VERY low miles requirement for Gold (and I think they credit 100%), Lufthansa is probably the worst. BMI is one of the better ones, but it will be assimilated by BA soon and become Avios I expect. Of course you have to fly with the above airlines to join their program, but Greece is lovely