I'd be so happy if they called it and marketed it as a "something for nothing" program instead of a loyalty or rewards program.
Impossible
Need to plan six months plus, ahead of time
Need to plan one-six months, ahead of time
Easy! My taxi driver takes them ..
I'd be so happy if they called it and marketed it as a "something for nothing" program instead of a loyalty or rewards program.
They must be doing something right or you wouldn't have such trouble getting a flight.
Yeah, I'm sure ...
None of the loyalty programs with which I am familiar impose blackout dates. With these programs, it's never an issue of how full the flight is since each flight has a set number of seats reserved for mileage awards. This means that you should be able to use your miles for any flight or destination as long as you book 1-3 months in advance. Our experience with Star Alliance thus far has corroborated this.
KIA, have you looked into the possibility of transferring your points from your card to Asia Miles to One World? I don't know if One World is any better with award redemptions, but they are better than Asia Miles on other issues that matter to us.
[QUOTE=
KIA, have you looked into the possibility of transferring your points from your card to Asia Miles to One World? I don't know if One World is any better with award redemptions, but they are better than Asia Miles on other issues that matter to us.[/QUOTE]
Interesting as I'm wondering about changing from using BA as my preferend airmiles program, and going with CX/Asia miles.
How have you found One World versus Asia miles and what are the issues on which the former is better?
Thanks!
Er, OneWorld is only a marketing alliance of various airlines. There is no such thing as a "OneWorld" frequent flyer programme - there are just the individual programmes of the member airlines.
As far as I am aware this is also the case with Star, but what Star does better is co-ordinate the programmes and make certain awards common across (much of) the alliance.
For full details and to tap a lot of resident expertise I strongly recommend the discussion forums over at http://www.flyertalk.com/forums/
Last edited by PDLM; 18-01-2007 at 02:23 PM.
just think of it another way, if it is easy to earn points (which is fairly true for the case of asia miles) you are going to expect alot of ppl with alot of points. and u wld expect the available tickets to be somewhat limited as with other programmes, hence u'd have lesser chance of using the points satisfactorily.
easy capitalistically way of looking at the issue
That's right, there are no OneWorld points. What I meant to say was AA. American Airlines partners with CX so any AA flight you book from, say HK to LAX, is actually a flight on CX. But you still get AA miles.
I've discussed my issues with Asia Miles in another thread, but the main gist of it is that Asia Miles has a lot of restrictions and fees.
Some newly discovered gripes that I have with Asia Miles are blackout dates and bonus miles. Re bonus miles, with AA, when you reach a certain status, you get bonus miles for every flight, making it much easier for you to maintain a status once you get it. Asia Miles does not have such a feature.
While we still prefer Star Alliance, we didn't want to always fly through Singapore, so the next best option for us was to fly CX booked through AA.
It is actually far easier to earn points on the US based programs... stuff like mortgages and half a million other silly things can accrue points.