Questions and Answers

So, I (foolishly) purchases a bunch of miles in Avianca’s last big sale so I’m now sitting with over 300K in LifeMiles.

I keep looking for business or first class availability on international routes and I find nothing. Doesn’t matter when or where. I search United on the same routes and find plenty of availability. Perfect example – right now, United is showing Polaris availability on their nonstop LAX-LHR UA923 on Friday 12 October. LifeMiles only shows coach availability. Same goes for many other routes.

Is there a trick to finding premium cabin space on LifeMiles? Or am I sitting with a bunch of worthless LifeMiles hoping to find that needle in a haystack?

I just checked and UA923 LAX-LHR on 12OCT has no saver availability. It shows “Everyday” availability for 155k United miles. This is [I]not[/I] available for booking with partners. For you to see it on LifeMiles’ website, United would need to show 60k for the flight.

While the LifeMiles were a great deal, did you have a plan in mind for the miles? Many people in this community recommends buying miles if you have an immediate plan to use them.

If you have some flexibility, there’s 14OCT LAX-DUB on Ethiopian Business Class, connecting to Aer Lingus economy to London. There’s also a bunch of mixed cabin UA flights LAX-EWR in Economy and EWR-LHR in business. On the 15th, There’s United First/Polaris for LAX-IAD-LHR.

There’s really no “trick” – you just need to know where to look, have some flexibility and be open to indirect routes and connections.

[USER=29]@David W[/USER] – at the time I was trying to book, there was 60k seat availability on UA. I could’ve booked it with UA miles. And I’m not looking to fly a mixed cabin trip anywhere. But again, at the time I looked on AV, there wasn’t even a mixed cabin offering available. My point was that any number of possible trips I checked to multiple destinations, while saver premium cabin tix were available through the UA site, none of that same availability showed on AV site

Like you, I also bought a bucket of Avianca Lifemiles. I did some availability searches before purchasing them, and also noticed some instances where Saver availability showed on united.com but Avianca could not access it, particularly on Lufthansa flights. But I could still find some space, so I bought with the acceptance that I’d probably have to search harder to find availability.

If you’re going from the US to Asia, try searching routes on Asiana. Avianca had access to all the Asiana space I saw with United’s tool while I was booking.