Cathy Pacific Airmiles or Avios on flight to Oz?

LisaC22

I'm flighing from Aberdeen/London Heathrow with BA then onwards to Hong Kong then Brisbane, return, with Cathy Pacific.

I don't know if I should join the CP airmiles programme (MarcoPolo?) or add the points to my Avios with BA? I've checked the BA points calculator and for some reason they seem to only be willing to add the points to the Hong Kong/Brisbane section. Does anyone know why?

I think that CP Marco Polo cancels the points if they are not used in a year. Does anyone know if this is correct?

In summary, which airmiles programme is recommended by you?

SW17

I'm not that familiar with the ins and outs of the Cathay Pacific Marco Polo Club scheme (in terms of whether it is a better scheme than BA Executive Club / Avios for miles/status earned), but you should consider the following:

> If you join Marco Polo, what else would you put there? Would you put the miles from other flights with Oneworld alliance carriers in that scheme, or would this be a one-off. If a one-off, would you have enough miles in the scheme to redeem for anything. Unless you can transfer between schemes, there is always a risk of "dead" miles sitting around that you can't use.

> Your miles are stored as "Asia Miles". Asia Miles is to Marco Polo roughly as Avios.com is to BA Executive Club. My understanding is that the miles would be valid for 3 years from when they are credited (at least for redemption, probably 1 year in terms of earning programme status).

> The number of miles can vary depending on whether you are crediting to the "home" scheme of the operating carrier. This is certainly the case that you get more on a BA flight when you credit to BA, but may not be the case on CX. I don't know their details.

> It seems highly unlikely that BA would not credit you with Avios and Tier Points for all the sectors (assuming this is a cash ticket, not bought with miles itself). They are both oneworld carriers, even if the miles credited would not be identical.

When you use the BA miles/TP calculator, you need to enter each flight separately, e.g. you cannot enter Aberdeen (or even London) to Brisbane, it won't give the correct result. You need to enter Aberdeen-London, then London-Hong Kong, then Hong Kong to Brisbane (changing the airline as appropriate for each sector), noting the miles and tier points for each flight and then adding them up. Then double them if you are returning on the same airline/route combination.

While I don't know the earning/spending levels on Marco Polo relative to BA's scheme (you can check on their website or on Flyertalk.com), my instinct would be that unless you intend to credit future flights to Marco Polo as well, you may be better off sticking with BA, just from the viewpoint of having miles in one place (assuming you can't transfer from one to the other, which I don't know).

You also don't mention if you currently have any status on the BA scheme, that might also make a difference to what you earn, but probably only on the domestic if LHR-HKG-BNE and return is all on CX.

Hope this helps, maybe others know more about Marco Polo, but the real knowledge for this may be found more easily on Flyertalk.