V-Flyer

New member and first time visitor to the site so first...hello!

My partner and I have both managed to accumulate about 40,000 miles + in recent years.

We did have it in mind that we’d wait for a reward seat sale or use the miles (we know we need to pay taxes) to buy our flights to the USA in late April/May 2014 but we need to fly back on a Friday or Saturday and at the minute those dates are greyed out.

Can you advise me of other ways we may be able to use them? How much more expensive roughly is to buy a seat in a class we’d be able to upgrade from. Do the miles work out well when used against hotels?

Or should we abandon that idea altogether and use it for a eurostar trip maybe?!

I’ve been reading a few posts on this forum (hence joining) and like everyone else I find the site and the rewards section like a maths puzzle!

If someone could offer us some pointers that would be much appreciated.

We ideally want to fly into San Francisco and out of LA from LHR. Then hire a car and stay in about 4 different hotels in California so any ideas on how these miles could be used would be much appreciated!

Thanks for your time!

is that 40k miles each or spread between two accounts and of so how many miles in each account. It makes a difference as you can't simply pool miles.

Have a look at this page - upgrade table shows how many miles you need to upgrade each leg. So to move from Y to PE you would need 12.5k miles to upgrade each leg per person to or from LA/SFO.

To upgrade you need to be in the right fare bucket (listed at the top of the table). To see how much one of these fares is see this page - search by fare code. Note that 'M' is the cheapest upgradable Economy fare and S for PE.

However the trick for best use of miles for rewards or upgrades is flexibility so having to return on a Friday or Saturday will limit your options. It might even be worth switching your trip from starting in SFO and leaving from LA to starting in LA and leaving from SFO.

As for hotels have a look at this page but there is no simple answer as many of the hotel schemes have different transfer rates into them (as well as a minimum number of miles) and vary in how many miles/points you need to get a 'free' room.

Hello and welcome!

How flexible are your dates? I know you need to fly back on a Friday/Saturday but could this be changed to a Thursday if you flew out a day earlier as well?

As you may have been, reward seats into SFO are pretty hard to come by. They do happen but not as often as some of the other routes. Would you consider flying in (and out as you have said) to LA and then jumping on a Virgin America or Jet Blue flight to SFO?

My advice would be to give the FC a call. Have your dates and details to hand and they will either help find you some dates that you are happy with or offer an alternative route?

Or you could easily buy upgradable seats and play the waiting game for G's to become available ... all depends on how brave you are! Some folks have great results, others not so much.

I'm not sure how much more expensive the seats would be to purchase as an upgrade fare code so will leave that for someone else to help with.

We have about 40,000 in my partners account and around 50,000 in my account.

Yeah we don't get much annual leave and it works out best Fri or Sat but of course it does for other people too hence why there's less availability. I guess for the sake of a day we could give Thursday a look.

Could also look at flying in and out of LA.

Thanks for the upgrade information, I'll take a good look at it. Not sure I am that brave though to wait and see!!

Well good to know we don't need to rule out hotels. I didn't know if they always worked out at a pretty poor deal!