Using miles plus money?

Hey everyone

I've been saving up some air miles to hopefully use at some stage in early 2018.

I want to fly to either vegas or Los Angeles for 3 weeks in total with to passenger in UC. I'll be visiting both places, I'm wondering which may be cheaper. I would like to try to use miles plus money but since their new changes I'm not sure what amount of each could look like...

Any info would be great!

Thanks

Hello

It sounds like you have two options:

- Miles plus money
- Full reward flight

Miles plus money is pretty easy to explain. You can offset the cash cost of the ticket, with miles. For every 3,000 miles used, it takes £18 off the price. There is no limit to how many miles you can use and you still earn miles and tier points for the flight taken.

Reward flights haven't changed apart from the number of miles needed - there's a table in the link above, but for both destinations it's 135,000 miles per person, 155,000 during the peak seasons. Peak season dates are in the link above.

A thing to bear in mind is that Upper Class to Vegas has only 14 seats. It's a popular route for UC and if you're going down the Reward Flight route (instead of miles & money) you may struggle to find 3 reward seats (also known as 'G's) out of only 14. There will be much more availability to LAX as there are three daily flights in the summer from LHR, although for early 2018 it'll likely be back down to two. More UC seats than Vegas either way.

In terms of which is better - miles plus money or full reward flights depends very much on the cash cost of the ticket (which can vary of course) and how many miles you expect to have.

That's the gist of it!

[mitchja]

Miles plus money does work a bit differently now.

There are no longer any specific miles plus money fares now. Instead you can apply a number of miles to any standard revenue (miles earning) fare to bring the cost down. For example:

MAN>BOS 13th May, return 17th May, Upper Class, Z fare.

Base Fare = £1002.79
You can bring the fare down by adding miles to the booking, for every 3000 miles that brings the fare down by £18.
As I only have 33,529 miles, the maximum amount of miles I can add is 33,000 which brings the fare down to £804.79 (-£198.00).

I'm not sure what the maximum number of miles you can add to a booking though sorry? The flights also have to be pure VS flights as well. If a DL connection is included, miles + money doesn't apply.

You would still earn the standard amount of miles + tier points for that fare as it's still a Z revenue fare.

You can play around with it on the VS website.

There is no cap on the number of miles you can use to bring the fare down, it just has to be in multiples of 3,000.

And unlike with full reward redemptions, with M+M you can use miles to pay the entire fare, including the taxes and fees.

It's not a particularly good use of miles but if you want to get rid of them and pay less cash it's worth considering.

Thanks for the replies

I thought la would be easier due to the fact they had more seats on board and it's a route I haven't flown yet.

Is there a best/cheaper time to fly to LA?

Back in 2014 I got a good m+m deal
Going UC to New York so hoping to get something decent this time around.

I will be earning 8,000 more miles with my Orlando trip in September so boosting the miles up

My OH has some miles to use. Is it best to call so they can take miles from both accounts as opposed to transferring them to my account.

Miles plus money?
You can buy miles for £15 per 1000 plus a transaction fee, then spend them and you get
£6 per 1000 off your ticket. That's a bargain (not)
I have in the past bought miles on miles booster at £10 per 1000 towards a reward upgrade, but even that rate doesn't make sense to spend them on miles plus money.

I'm just looking at the upgrade tables but not sure I understand.
In the blurb it says the table shows how many miles you need for a round trip but the table says One Way
West coast 101.200 to upgrade from Economy to Upper.
Surely that for the return. It's only 135000 for a full upper reward off peak return.
Dick D