Best Uses Of Australian American Express Points

"While the surcharges are killer, the redemption rate makes up for it."

A significant portion of that was probably UK APD ... should be almost 200GBP to Australia in business class?

QANTAS are notoriously sh*t when it comes to reward space. Even within domestic it can be nigh on impossible getting a bottom of the rung economy reward. Really rubbish.

VA excels in this regard; not just domestic but also Trans-Tasman and it turns out USA as well (which is great to know!). I now fly 100% domestically and Trans-Tasman with VA (or Air NZ, still get my VA points/status credits). Thanks for confirming I'm making the right choice when it comes to reward space if/when I get around to searching for it!

I recently moved to Australia from the US and I'm still adjusting to the miles and points landscape. I'm currently on an award trip visiting my family in London and it is a real pain getting out of Australia.

I have avois and delta skymiles and no transferable points to speak of. Since I had way more avios I was looking to use them, however my options out of Melbourne were very poor, Malaysian and Qatar in Y. Skymiles was a little more promising, I could find business class Virgin Australia space to Denpasar, Bali where I could pick up Cathay to London via HKG. However what I ended up doing was using Skymiles for China Eastern to Shanghai and BA from there to London. 110000 miles and modest fuel surcharges seem ok for an 8 hour J flight.

China Eastern was a pleasant surprise on the was out. J features fully flat beds, albeit in 2-2-2 configuration. Service was pretty good, the food was edible, not great. Probably The best thing that can be said was that on a 2230 departure arriving at 0630 they got the service out of the way as quickly as possible to maximise sleep.

Anyway it would be good to know the best options to get skyteam miles, because China Eastern and China Southern have a substantial presence out of Australia.

Dear Alex:

A few comments I would like to add.

" like business class between Australia and Europe for just 51,000 points provided you can find “basic” level space."
"I guess they don’t want to fill up their empty planes"
- In fact it is not hard to find MH space and I find they are actually one of the most generous airlines in releasing award space to Enrich members. I have never had problems finding the "basic" level in the past, unless they have recently changed.
- This makes transfer to Enrich program actually quite valuable, although you can purchase miles from Enrich for about 2c each if you have at least 1000 miles (which you get by simply signing up), so there is really no need to us MR points.

Also I agree with transferring to velocity a good value. The other value of VA is the ability to redeem Etihad flights. VA has access to all Etihad guest's inventory, that mean award space is good! The mileage needed is much lower than Etihad guest and VA allows you to cancel and change, so a lot more flexible than Etihad guest. So it really makes no sense to transfer MR points to Etihad guest, unless you want to spend 2 million points to redeem their residence which is not available to VA members.

I was excited to see this post thinking that it might help me out with rewards from NZ. Then I saw that all of the ratios are 2:1 for the same airlines, and the Air NZ rate is even worse! 175 points for 1 airpoints dollar!

At this point I'm thinking the only way to earn miles is to accrue them directly through frequent flyer programs. Are there any airlines that are particularly generous or ones that should be avoided?

800,000 NZ membership reward points balance and not sure best way to redeem them. One thing for certain is that I will be avoiding Air NZ.

Hope an article is done for New Zealand.

Love to see a post for Aussies, thank you.
I rate CX Asia Miles a little more than you do, they have some great sweet spots (if you can negotiate the table.. or do what I do and just call them up).

JAL First Class SYD-NRT is currently 120K Asia Miles return with loads of availability between now and the end of March. QF Frequent Flyer is charging 228K points return for the same seats..!!

Hi
Love your blog. Want to ask about credit cards. I am pretty sure I know the answer but......
I am an irish citizen, living in Australia but have a US Bank of America debit card. I do not have a current social security number or US address, do you know of any way I can sign up for all the great US credit card offers there are so I can take advance of the points, or is that a pipe dream?

Thanks

@ David plant -- Wish there were, but unfortunately not possible. Sorry!

Was looking for availability for PER-AMS or PER-BRU flight, and it seemed that SQ has very low number of points required to AMS (59,500 KF miles one-way business). But I couldn't find any award space in their Saver Award which wasn't wait-listed 6-7 month into the future.. Anybody has experience with this? And how fast the wait-list might clear..??

Handy blog recommendation, thanks - off to Oz for a year soon!