Questions and Answers

Hello everyone,

About a year ago I started a small business which now runs itself and as I’ve always wanted to see the world I’m been thinking of visiting countries and staying there for a little while exploring the place. I’ve been pricing tickets on round the world ticketing sites as well as buying one way tickets to each country and the prices are quite reasonable.

I’m currently not a member of any alliance but I’m not really sure about who to join though I am leaning towards OneWorld becuase I fly SriLankan and Qatar Airways a lot. I noticed that the SriLankan Miles scheme requires the least amount of miles to get OneWorld Emerald (60,000) I think that I could do that in a year. My business partner actually has a Sapphire equivalent card with Sri Lankan and should get Emerald status by June, so would he have a chance at asking for an upgarde at check in when flying on a OneWorld airline?

What I’d really like to know is if it would be possible to travel in business or first class rather than in economy. How does this work? Do you use miles to upgrade to a better class or do you get a better chance if you have a high status (such as Emerald).

Lucky says that he travels on first class using points and miles and I’ve come across people who say that they usually pay less than the economy price for their business or first class tickets and I would really like to learn these secrets.

I’m from the UK so it’s seems to be more difficult to get miles from things like credit cards.

Some advice would be very much appreciated.

Thanks for reading.

[USER=1432]@Emmanuel[/USER] – check out this post [USER=7]@Tiffany[/USER] wrote and see if it answers some of your questions. If you have more, just let us know and we’ll try to help out.

[URL]http://onemileatatime.boardingarea.com/2015/07/30/choose-credit-card-outside-us/[/URL]

[USER=1432]@Emmanuel[/USER]–while status does improve your chances of getting upgrades on the airline where you earned it, it is rare to get upgraded for non-operational reasons (oversold flights would be an example of operational issues) on long haul international travel. So if you travel frequently, status might still be worth it for a more comfortable travel experience like lounge access, priority boarding, waived fees etc but I wouldn’t go out of my way to earn it expecting upgrades to business on international flights. Never hurts to ask for an upgrade but I wouldn’t hold my breath.

You can use miles to upgrade a paid economy seat to business but it is usually a poorer value than booking the ticket entirely with miles. So if you can book directly into J or F, you’ll be better off. If you can’t then you can try to upgrade a paid Y fare. Keep in mind that in [U]most cases[/U], upgrades

– are only for one class of service so if your flight has premium economy, you will only be able to upgrade from economy to premium economy
– are dependent on booking fare class so miles and cash payments may vary and some fare classes may not be eligible for upgrades
– need miles for the carrier that is ticketing and flying the flight

Hope this helps!

Thanks for the replies both of you.

The problem with using credit cards for me is that I probably won’t be approved due to my income source not being in the UK and I also don’t spend much money when I’m here (only in UK for 3 months a year and spend less than £2000 during that period)

So I guess the only option is to get miles by actually flying.

Is there a calculation site where I can see how any miles I would need for different routes on different airlines? For example, If I wanted to fly business class on Qatar Airways from London to Tokyo where can I find out the amount of miles that I would need?

Most airlines publish their award charts on their website, usually under the details of their frequent flier programs. If you go to the QR website you’ll see how much they charge. But QR can also be booked with any OneWorld or other partner if they have saver space available so you would also look at the programs (e.g. AA, BA etc to see what their cost in miles would be for the same route).

There are some online calculation engines that do this (e.g. [URL]http://www.milez.biz/en/index.php[/URL]) but I’m not sure how up to date they are.