10% bonus miles when converting bank points into Asia Miles

[Luciana Lanza]

Not at all. The vast majority of my bookings with them have been done online. I can’t remember why I had to call them but I think it had something to do with including a domestic leg that wasn’t showing up online.



It’s a good programme, particularly for Cathay’s own flights as they generally release more award flights to Asia Miles than to other programmes. Do your research, but be careful about transferring speculatively.

 

[Luciana Lanza]

Do you or anyone else in this forum know whether it’s easier to get a Qatar or Cathay redemption to Europe? I’ve been able to snag some saver 90k seats in J worth Qatar but it took a bit effort this time and was wondering whether they want to increase the cost and so releasing less? Has Cathay increased its cost in the last little while? Which is the better program in people’s view? Thanks to all for your help.

 

[Human]

Do you or anyone else in this forum know whether it’s easier to get a Qatar or Cathay redemption to Europe? I’ve been able to snag some saver 90k seats in J worth Qatar but it took a bit effort this time and was wondering whether they want to increase the cost and so releasing less? Has Cathay increased its cost in the last little while? Which is the better program in people’s view? Thanks to all for your help.

Good question. There's not a simple answer.

The first thing to consider is that Qatar flies to many, many more destinations in Europe than Cathay does. So in that basic sense yes, of course, it's "easier" to get a Qatar redemption to Europe because they fly to Europe many, many more times per day than Cathay does.

As has been pointed out many times on AFF, the bottleneck is flights into and out of Australia. So your question really is: which airline has more availability out of Australia into their hubs (DOH and HKG)?

For the past few years, Qatar has been releasing little-to-no "Saver" awards at all during the norther Summer (about June to late August). So if you're wanting to use points to fly to Europe over the northern Summer, and you want awards at the "Saver" level, Cathay has been your only option out of the two.

For other times of the year, it's more complicated. Possibly Cathay has slightly better availability out of Australia, but worse availability to Europe.

So there's not a simple answer to your question at all.