SQ or another FF program?

[Anastascia]

Hi AFF,

A good friend of mine has asked me for some assistance with her upcoming travel and FF situation. Her and her family are relocating to Beijing at the end of the year and are travelling SQ business from Sydney. I have worked out that for 3 pax in J that should give her 600 VA status credits if she pools them all to one VA account. However, they will be in Beijing for a few years and intend to travel as much as possible whilst there including to Japan and Europe.

Does anyone have any advice on how to best maximise these status credits? Send to VA or try for star alliance status? I am not familiar with star alliance status so not much help to her unfortunately.

Thank you in advance.

 

[Mattg]

VA Gold status may be of some use to them, but Star Alliance status would be much more useful than VA being based in Beijing. Trouble is, SQ doesn't have family pooling so you wouldn't get to Gold status on this trip.

I would personally try to build up points & status with a Star Alliance program over VA in this situation. KrisFlyer is an obvious choice as its a great program. You may also want to investigate Air China, ANA and Asiana's programs (though I probably wouldn't bother with Air China due to poor redemption rates).

If crediting to Velocity, Virgin does now have partnerships with Hainan, Beijing Capital Airlines etc. so all is not lost.

 

[Anastascia]

VA Gold status may be of some use to them, but Star Alliance status would be much more useful than VA being based in Beijing. Trouble is, SQ doesn't have family pooling so you wouldn't get to Gold status on this trip.

I would personally try to build up points & status with a Star Alliance program over VA in this situation. KrisFlyer is an obvious choice as its a great program. You may also want to investigate Air China, ANA and Asiana's programs (though I probably wouldn't bother with Air China due to poor redemption rates).

If crediting to Velocity, Virgin does now have partnerships with Hainan, Beijing Capital Airlines etc. so all is not lost.

Thank you so much Matt. Do you know if any Star Alliance partners allow family pooling? I've looked at ANA and Asiana and I believe the answer is no for those two.

 

[Mattg]

Thank you so much Matt. Do you know if any Star Alliance partners allow family pooling? I've looked at ANA and Asiana and I believe the answer is no for those two.

Quite a few programs allow you to transfer points between family members' accounts (KrisFlyer is not one) and Aegean lets you combine family acconts. But I'm not aware of any Star Alliance airlines that have proper family pooling which includes status retention.

 

[Must...Fly!]

I was actually just reading about EgyptAir, apparently they allow in their program. Might be worth investigating.