Best ways to get to Asia using miles (premium cabins)

I left them out because they are not transfer partners with any of the transferable currencies. I’d generally rather collect points that I can use with transfer partners so that I can top off an account or put miles together from multiple programs.

Alaska made the list because in addition to their credit cards you can transfer from Marriott (potentially useful for someone who travels frequently for work and as a result earns tons of Marriott points).

I did not include programs like AA or Japan Airlines Mileage Bank since their points are less convenient to amass via multiple avenues.

Still, many readers will have AA miles, so I will likely add AA to the list here.

I mean, I wouldn’t recommend transferring to any airline partner *today*. This guide is meant as a reference so you know which points to collect. For example, you can quickly see that Chase only has 3 transfer partners on this list and two of those overlap with Membership Rewards (which has 7 on the list). If you’d like to travel to Asia, you’re probably better stocking up on Membership Rewards, which will give you your pick of transferring to Virgin Atlantic, Asia Miles, ANA, or whoever it is that makes sense due to availability and your starting location. At the time when you book is when you’ll need to consider each airline’s financial state, and I wouldn’t recommend booking with anyone today since we have no idea what flights will be operating or which airlines will be in business or which countries will be open to foreigners and when. I’d generally hold off on booking for at least a few more months to get an idea as to what the future holds.

In terms of Virgin Atlantic specifically, I share Greg’s expectation that they are very unlikely to completely liquidate and therefore I am not more concerned about Virgin Atlantic miles than many of the other airlines on the list. But I also agree with Greg that I wouldn’t transfer more miles to Virgin Atlantic today for no good reason. Nor would I transfer to anyone else without an imminent plan.

https://frequentmiler.com/should-i-burn-my-million-virgin-atlantic-miles/

Good suggestion. I’ll see what we come up with. It’s a little difficult because some programs require awards to be round trip (and it isn’t always universal — Korean awards with Alaska miles have to be round trip, but Cathay awards with Alaska miles don’t for example) and sometimes there are different prices depending on carrier (ANA flights on their own metal are cheaper than awards on Star Alliance carriers and even for ANA flights there is a low season price, a regular season price, and a high season price) and then not everyone defines regions in a uniform way (some programs have a price to “North Asia” vs “South Asia”, others call them “Asia 1” vs “Asia 2”, some programs consider India part of Asia and others consider India its own region, etc). Add on to that not every program publishes an award chart and it can get complex.

Still, worth thinking about. Thanks for the suggestion!

I probably wouldn’t bother booking anything for 2020. For 2021, I imagine lounges will be open and service will be whatever the new normal becomes. That probably won’t be the same as in the past, but I am at least hopeful that operations will be normalish in 2021 (though clearly nobody knows for sure right now). Still, they will eventually be normalish — so I’m happy to hoard miles for now with my eye on some specific awards.

In terms of does it make sense to redeem miles if travel is safe but the travel experience is sub-optimal compared to today: the answer there is very subjective. I love all of the intangibles that come with premium cabin travel — great service, good food, lounges, etc — but if premium cabin travel came with all of those things but had an economy class seat (or even the equivalent of a domestic first class recliner-style seat), I wouldn’t bother redeeming miles for premium cabins. The reason I redeem miles for premium cabins is primarily for a spacious, comfortable seat. I didn’t know how much I would appreciate that until I started redeeming miles for premium cabin travel. Now I mostly ignore the super cheap fare sales to Asia because I just don’t want to fly that far in economy class when I have miles available to me. So if I’m going to travel to Asia, it makes sense to me to redeem miles for premium cabin travel.

Whether or not and when travel makes sense is something I can’t answer at all. I wouldn’t fly halfway around the world when it isn’t safe (obviously), but neither would I be in a hurry to fly halfway around the world if things like museums and restaurants and beaches and cultural experiences and hotels are either closed or limited-access in a way that seems unenjoyable. I don’t know when that stuff will return to normalish (I keep using that word so as to differentiate from what we previously knew as normal), but I’m sure there will be a time when I’ll be interested enough to get back on the horse so to speak.

For what it’s worth, I think the types of trips I take will likely be different for a while. For example, this isn’t Asia, but I could imagine going back to Australia to drive The Great Ocean Road or re-do my road trip between Cairns and Brisbane or to drive the outback. I’ll be less interested in being packed in on Bondi Beach, but there is plenty of wide open space in Australia and a lot of it can be really enjoyable in a road trip / nature appreciation form. I could also envision going to a secluded resort in the Maldives or Bora Bora where I’d have less contact with others by design and the purpose of the trip is to lounge rather than to experience the local culture. Will I be in a rush to go to Tokyo to stand at Shibuya Crossing or to cram into a small street food stand in Bangkok? Probably not for a while just for fear of exposure to too many people in a confined space. On the other hand, perhaps those places will institute measures that drop risks significantly. It’s hard to predict.

But still, I’ll collect eyeing some of these sweet spots as I imagine by 2022 we’ll have a vaccine (fingers crossed) and if I spend a year collecting I’ll be ready to spend the better part of a year working remotely from beaches somewhere around the world. Maybe. Hopefully. We can dream, right?