saintstu

Hi,

just an update. After buying the 50+50 free for myself & girlfriend we did the share 40+20 deal to give ourselves 120,000 each for about $1800 AUD.

Last night I managed to secure Business Class flights home to London over Xmas!

Out 17th Dec PER-HKT-BKK (2 night layover) - LHR (arr 19th Dec)

Back 8th Jan LHR-ZUR-BKK-PER (arr 9th Jan)

All Thai Airways except LHR-ZUR on Swiss.

Taxes are about $400, so the grand total, including booking fees is around $2300 AUD each.

Bearing in mind the cheapest economy flights over Xmas are $2-2.5k, this is an absolute bargain.

Thanks again BCWorld. You are an absolute legend.

debsy

phew! I just paid that price for cattle class return to Istanbul . Now thinking about booking another trip - BC world can you book these flights for uner 18 year olds and also what do you think my chances would be of getting three seats? Thanks. Kind regards Debs

bcworld

Yes you can book for kids. 3 is not impossible, but not easy either.

No decent promo running at the moment though if you don't already have any miles.

Tonyc88

Couple of quick questions that may have been covered:

- If flying first of business class with one of the airline groups does this give you automatic access to their business / first class lounge or are there some exceptions?

- Do US Airways ever have reduced miles incentives where they do things such as lower the amount needed to fly to Europe to 100k rather than 120k? I notice some of the other airlines do this quite often.

KJCherokee

See above

bcworld

Possibly, but more than likely only on their own services. Their business / first levels are already generous when compared to economy.

I've bagged BA business class redemptions at half price before, but they were only applicable on BA flights, not Oneworld partners.

saintstu

Does anyone know if there's a limit to how many miles you can purchase?

I've been working it out and , even without the deal, it works out cheaper to buy and use miles than to actually pay for business class flights. As a comparison these are the rough total costs for return Business Class flights with & without the deal (at current US/AUD exchange rates):

• UK, Europe, Hawaii, Mexico, Caribbean, South America, Middle East - c$2400 with deal / c$3900 without
• US & Canada - c$2175 / c$3625
• Africa - c$2675 / c$4175
• Asia - c$1250 / c$2000
• New Zealand & Anywhere else in South Pacific - c$500 / c$900

bcworld

There is no limit. (50k max per purchase though)

Points.com starts bouncing your credit card after a few transactions though.

bcworld

Just a heads up to check very carefully if US Airways does send you emails regarding your itinerary. I got an email from them today with details of my upcoming flights. The email itself didn't mention any changes but when I looked at the details they showed me departing Sydney on the Thai afternoon flight rather than the morning flight I've always been booked on.

I checked my booking on the TG website and it still showed the morning flight same as always.

Called TG and they confirmed that nothing had changed.

I'm not quite sure how US Airways could get this wrong unless someone manually keys in all the info for these alerts...surely not! But if I'd turned up for the afternoon flight as per their email I'd actually have missed mine!

Once again, definitely worth a call to the operating airline to confirm details a couple of days before!

bcworld

Hmmm...this is not as simple as I first thought.

It seems US Airways are doing their best to screw up the flights I booked months ago. I have been playing phone tennis between US and TG all morning but it looks like I am going to have my plans changed for no good reason...no one at TG can understand why, US will only speak to TG's LA office which is now closed for the day.

I'm frickin raging! :curse:

KJCherokee

Not quite sure what the problem is BC. If Thai are happy that you are booked on their morning flight, what does it matter what US think?

bcworld

It matters because US were in the (non reversible) process of pushing through a ticket change on the itinerary and hence changing the flights. This is because their computer said no and most probably is down to an IT issue of theirs.

After I made that post on Friday my TG itinerary started showing 6 flights for 4 sectors...they were also pushing a change on my BKK-LHR that they didn't even mention to me. Then bizarrely one of the six just dropped off leaving me with simultaneous bookings on 2 flights flying at the same time ex SYD...in that situation I have no way of knowing what will eventually happen.

I got up at 6am Saturday to call US when the TG LA office would be open and eventually spoke to the helpful Phyllis who actually listened to what TG had been telling me and called them up and got it fixed. She couldn't / wouldn't offer any explanation as to what went on.

It is a bit of a worry though, on my DM account the reservation now looks like this....great value for 150,000 miles!!!

bcworld

It's on again!

Need a few more miles? Want to give a loved one the gift of travel? Buy or gift miles between August 1 and September 15, 2011 and get (or give) 10,000 bonus miles for every 10,000 miles.

• Buy 10,000 – 19,000 miles = 10,000 bonus
• Buy 20,000 – 29,000 miles = 20,000 bonus
• Buy 30,000 – 39,000 miles = 30,000 bonus
• Buy 40,000 – 49,000 miles = 40,000 bonus
• Buy 50,000 miles = 50,000 bonus

http://www.usairways.com/en-US/divid...s/default.html

saintstu

Woohoo!

Tonyc88

Wow, that blew out my notion that they only put on this offer at their end of quarter.

The next tie would have been September by my guess! Good to be wrong in this case!