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Answers (4)

Where should I combine my UR and MR for international premium cabin award?

Where should I combine my UR and MR for international premium cabin award?

  1. Kevin P. New Member

    How does one combine their UR and MR they have accrued from their Chase and Amex cards? I know I can redeem them for KrisFlyer, FlyingBlue, and Avois. Are there any others at a 1:1 ratio? I want to combine my points to take a long international flight (US to South Africa) and hope to fly business or first class with my reward. All three of the above mentioned have some negatives with using them:

    Singapore doesn’t fly to South Africa, so my redeemed points cost a lot more to use of their Star Alliance partners. Plus when flying Singapore you have to pay fuel surcharges (I think this applies if you use one of their partners since I will be using KrisFlyer miles).

    KLM and Air France do fly to South Africa, but the point redemptions don’t go as far according to Lucky. Not sure if there are fuel surcharges on this type of flight if you use an award, does anyone know?

    British Airways does go to SA, but I know they have big fuel surcharges, and a previous poster seemed to be negative on their first and business class.

    Does anyone have a recommendation of the lesser evil here? Or a different suggestion of where to redeem my points for miles? Thanks in advance, just getting started with this “hobby”.

  2. Kevin P. New Member

    *Correction. Singapore Air does fly to South Africa, but they charge high fuel surcharges, no? Is it worth it when booking a business or first class cabin?

  3. MidSouthSkier Community Ambassador

    I’d bookmark this post from Frequent Miler: [URL]http://frequentmiler.boardingarea.com/2014/06/24/transfer-partner-master-list/[/URL]
    While it’s old, the spreadsheet referenced in it is kept up-to-date. It will show you what bank points (like URs and MRs) can be transferred to which airlines and at what rate. While most are 1-to-1, note that when transferring 250 MRs you only get 200 BA Avios.

    To combine your URs and MRs you’d simply transfer them to whichever frequent flyer program best suits your needs – AFTER you’ve found award space, of course

    To research what miles are the best to use, I’d check out the Award Maximizer created by Scott from the Travel Codex blog: [URL]http://www.travelcodex.com/award-maximizer/[/URL] While the tool doesn’t support all airlines, it does support a great many. He even indicates which airlines are transfer partners of UR, MR, TY and SPG points. For some airlines he even has links to help you find award space, view routing rules and read up on the fees & surcharges. This info isn’t available for all the airlines he covers but it’s a great place to start.

    Note that all award prices are for one-way travel. For flights on BA, here’s a reminder that each segment is priced separately so you can’t just price, for example, JFK-JNB, you’d need to price JFK-LHR and LHR-JNB to get the correct price.

  4. Kevin P. New Member

    Super helpful, thanks so much [USER=184]@MidSouth Skier[/USER]

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