I too am international-based, and I agree that flying on other airlines kind of defeats the purpose of being elite on UA. My general strategy would be to do maybe two AC J trips per year, earning 4-5,000 PQP on each of those trips. That means you have to get 8-10,000 more PQPs and 42 or so PQFs for 1K status from flying UA/UAX metal, which I think is pretty do-able. The fact that I live in an outstation means most of my trips are six segments.

 

$0.352/PQP is a great ratio indeed!

I booked YVR-HKG-BKK in January not for a mileage run but because it's a good month to visit Bangkok, hotels weren't expensive and work is quiet.
It's still available, $2300 for 5552 PQP in business with AC and TG - $0.414/PQP if I calculated the PQPs correctly.

And I did several TPAC trips in Y this year but the new rules will require too many of those.

 

The recent ORD-BLR can net around 7,100 PQP for $2,400 with some creative routings on AC/AI. Comes out to $0.338/PQP.

 

I’ve been booking the YVR-SIN run on AC/SQ for a few FT members and with backtracking via YYZ, it’s a great opportunity to clean up on PQP. I’m doing one myself with only a single YYZ backtrack and it’s 6,731 PQP at 0.34 each, if I was able to add the extra backtrack, the total would be almost 1,500 higher.

Contrary to the comment up thread, if you’re doing these runs, I would do as much as you can as soon as you can, to pile up the maximum number of PQP early in the year before they make any changes.

 

I agree that changes are more likely to be in the direction of fewer PQP, not more. However, I just don't think it makes sense to buy flights just for PQP purposes until you know how many PQP you need to get to whatever your status goal is. Most of us can't project the year well enough to know that.

Now, I do agree that if you are planning travel anyway, it makes sense to consider non-UA carriers -- and thank you for reminding me about that fare, because I may actually have a use for it. But I can't get behind the idea of doing a February PQP run unless it's to attain status for 2020 (i.e., a higher level than achieved in 2019).

 

The other thing that gets me is $2,000+ is a lot of money to run for status, and even at 3.0x that's only a quarter of the way to 1K. If you were going to take that trip anyway, great, but otherwise taking international trips on Premium Fare Deals kind of obviates the need for the primary benefit of 1K -- overwater upgrades. That's the catch-22 I see with the super-high bar

 

That's a great return! Just out of curiosity, where did you find these rates?
I couldn't find anything reasonable from West Canada to Asia via YYZ (I normally use Google Flights and ITA Matrix).

I agree and believe UA will make it harder to earn PQPs with partners.

I have my 2020 almost all set and booked already: 6 trips with UA W fares (so I could use my GPUs, confirmed at booking) and a couple of AC business flights.

 

These flights are not pricing correctly most of the time on Matrix or Google, I need to build them segment by segment in our GDS and issue the ticket directly for the FT member. Most members just send me a range of dates, and I can hunt for the required space and build the itinerary manually.

I just did my own last night YVR-YYZ-HKG-SIN-HKG-YVR which priced over $5K on Matrix but $2,400 when I booked it myself.

 

From the Wiki:

What about codeshare segments?As before, codeshares do not matter. Only the operating carrier (metal) of each segment and the stock of the ticket determine your earnings.

Looking at SFO-STR, one option that pops us is on SQ (SFO-JFK-FRA-STR). Not a great routing, but the question is:

SFO-JFK SQ1426 (operated by AS)
JFK-FRA SQ25
FRA-STR SQ2054 (operated by LH)

So, if I understand the rules (assuming this is all ticketed on 618 stock), I would get:

ZERO PQPs for SQ1426 as it is operated by AS which is not a partner)
(RDM*Any Fare Class Multiplier)/6 for SQ25 as this is an SQ operated flight and SQ is a non-preferred partner (divide by 6)
(RDM*Any Fare Class Multiplier)/5 for SQ2054 as this is an LH operated flight and LH is a preferred partner (divide by 5)

Yes?

 

Correct. SQ doesn't play particularly nice with *A, as evidenced by them codesharing with AS here.

 

Well to be fair, not like UA can supply them with any connecting passengers at JFK...

 

Yeah, I booked this myself for the PQP (thank you for this btw!) backtrack in both directions plus stopover in YYZ. Should be in the neighborhood of $2374 for 8432 PQP so that's ... 0.28 per qualifying point? What acronym are people using for this now? CPQP?

I thought about adding a stopover in HKG as well, but decided against it with the unrest there.

I had a very tough time justifying this as well. I've never actually paid for J (or even flown J) prior to booking the above ticket. I figured I'd try it for a year and see how it goes. It probably means I take one less international trip next year to "pay" for the $1800 difference compared to what a Y fare would cost me. Historically I got away with booking super cheap G/K/L UA fares in the 3-4cpm range.

So yeah, I guess UA "got" me here. I ended up paying for premium cabin ... just not United's premium cabin. Their loss?

I got my itinerary to price correctly on Matrix, and then booked using PowerTools via AC website. It took a bit of fiddling to get the right segments though -- I think there is something funky with trying to book itineraries involving the SQ codeshare legs on some dates.

 

I've been using the reciprocal and calling it "efficiency," personally. But, if people are looking at it as a cost-per-point metric, then CPQP or just $/P might make sense.

What did you do with your GPUs?

The benefit of PlusPoints, as far as I'm concerned, is that I can fly the same number of trips as last year, with all overwater legs in J/F, for less money in 2020 than 2019, because I can book these discounted J fares -- which I rarely booked before -- plus I can use 80 +P to upgrade a G/K fare to PZ, and I suspect that the total will be less than I spent on W fares in the past.

 

I'm of the mind that CPQP probably makes the most sense if we're comparing it to cpm pre-2020 program changes, since the discussion topic basically comes down to "how much did you spend to earn status."

This year I clocked in at 54k PQM for $2800ish PQD so right at 5cpm, but if I cut out a bunch of the last minute SEA-IAD fares I had to fly, then I'd be closer to 3cpm for the year.

I've actually never had any RPUs/GPUs. I used to credit to SQ back when G/K fares earned 100% mileage flown -- technically this (next) year is the first year I've qualified for UA status.

I think upgrading overwater UA segments with PlusPoints nominally makes sense. If I had any to burn, I'd probably try booking cheap G/K/L fares on routes I know have a Polaris cabin, and then try to upgrade those. The PQP earnings on 016 stock aren't good enough for me to justify paying for Polaris outright (otherwise I wouldn't be posting here looking for PQP earning shortcuts ).

Edit: so I'm guessing the game going forward will be some form of "buy OAL premium cabin on discount fare" and then use the earned PlusPoints to upgrade cheap UA economy fares, and if the upgrade doesn't clear, at least you have E+ to fallback on.

 

That's a good point. It definitely goes to underscore the differences in personal situation.. if you can move all of your travel over to these runnable fares, I think you win (as you are). In my case (and I'm guessing a lot of us), we're suddenly 9-12k PQP short on top of our normal travel load, and when 1K was financing most of one or two international trips (unless all solo) it's hard to add 9-12k on top (even if run at 3x, that's still a couple of trips and several thousand dollars), especially when that travel looks like what you were already doing anyway

But I sometimes have had GPU go to waste because I struggle to drain all my instruments and miles against a limited amount of PTO - I also think I take longer vacations than the typical FTer.