(Sorry for the lack of posting recently, some school exams caught up to me- you should see increased posts in the next week or so.)

I was going to do this as one long post covering all three alliances and their options to Australia, however that would have gotten out of hand, so I’ve split them up into three for each of the alliances. This post will cover the Star Alliance. Despite being generally the best alliance out of the three, it is sadly the weakest alliance when it comes to flights to Australia. One of the most common complaints is how stingy United often is with its business and first class award availability on the routes to and from Australia. However, with some flexibility and a bit of ingenuity, there are some tips for booking that ultimate Australian journey on Star Alliance.

One of the most common complaints is how stingy United often is with its business and first class award availability on the routes to and from Australia. However, there are some tips for booking that ultimate Australian journey.

Book Your Tickets Well In Advance

Availability is often greatest at the 330-day window when award inventory is usually released by the airlines. Still, it is impossible to find award availability every day, but 330 days out you can pretty much guarantee availability +/- 2 days from intended date of travel. So as always a bit of flexibility is required when looking for award seats. There are a couple of exceptions- if you are looking for business or first class space during the Australian/New South Wales school holidays- so that’s typically all of January, your odds of finding relatively direct flights are practically nil. In this case, you’ll have to consider alternate routings.

Transfer your United miles to Continental

This really applies to all awards, not just awards to Australia- if you have not yet linked your United MP and Continental OnePass accounts, it is very wise to link them up immediately and transfer all your miles to Continental. There really should be no reason for one to use United miles over Continental, given the wider range of partners, more flexible routing rules, superior search engine and ability to mix and match Star Alliance and other partners.

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Priority Club has just released their latest PointsBreaks list. If you are unfamiliar with the PointsBreaks concept, it is a list of hotels that are periodically released by Priority Club for redemption for a mere 5,000 points. While there’s the usual host of Holiday Inns and Candlewood Suites, there are a couple of Crowne Plaza’s and occasionally a couple of InterContinentals.

Last PointsBreaks list included the InterContinental Cleveland, and this time we go one better (esp. for United/Continental flyers!) with the InterContinental Chicago O’Hare on sale for 5,000 points. Considering that Priority Club points are consistently valued at around 0.6 cents per point and obtainable at that rate, $30 for an InterContinental is an unbeatable deal!

US Airways often have their thing where they sell miles at half their face value. It’s a smart way to generate some quick revenue, but will come back to haunt them in liabilities in the future. So over time perhaps US Airways saw how unsustainable the practice was and made some changes, but nevertheless it’s back.

Just after the last promo period US Airways upped their priced to 3.5 cents per mile- or 1.75 cents per mile during the promo period. Most importantly, whereas previously members were allowed to purchase 100,000 miles at the discounted rate, this time members are only allowed to purchase 80,000 miles. So crucially, whereas members could buy miles and immediately “flip” them for a business class ticket to Europe, 80,000 miles doesn’t allow that to occur, meaning that one would need to purchase the remaining 20,000 miles at the full price or otherwise save up the rest of the miles. Nevertheless it remains a great deal that most people should take advantage of.

And in summary? It sucks. (Not that anybody should have been surprised- their refusal to release their award chart in advance speaks volumes). Let’s get some of the lowdown on the changes that have occured (and whether or not he thinks we’ll like them )

• No more stopovers. British Airways have essentially gone from the most generous frequent flyer program in terms of stopovers to the least generous. Want a stopover? Break the award into two.
• Distance based awards. Combined with the “no stopovers” rule, it essentially means the more actual flown miles that are in your award, the more you pay. While this gives a slight advantage to those who previous redeemed awards for shorter flights between two zones (such as Boston-London for US-Europe), it ends up being prohibitively costly for those who previously used layovers and transfer points to maximise their awards. On the new Avios program, nothing’s free.
• Lower fuel surcharges for intra-Europe flights. If there’s one thing that BA was known for, it was their incredibly high fuel surcharges. On intra-European flights, these fuel surcharges often exceeded the cost of a revenue ticket, giving miles a negative value! Now, this issue has been rectified, encouraging members to book “cheaper” regional flights rather than more costly premium cabin long haul flights.

A note on the distance based awards- each sector is priced out individually regardless of whether or not one is stopping over there, or transferring there. So while “no more stopovers” is one way to look at the change, a (more optimistic) view could be that stopovers are now indeed free- as you are being charged whether you lay over (<24h) or stop over (>24h). So while Sydney to Perth would price out as one award, Port Macquarie to Perth via Sydney would be two awards- whether you are staying in Sydney or simply connecting. So while it can be a positive in certain circumstances, in the majority of the time (i.e. when you are connecting but not stopping over), it is a huge negative and penalises those awards that require multiple connections to reach the final destination.

Gary from View From The Wing also talks a bit more in detail about the program. The official Avios website can be found here, but as with all BA websites, it is prone to errors and confusing to navigate.