I just found out that you cannot cancel an Enrich award booking and all fees paid cannot be refunded (under M.18 in the terms and conditions). They do however allow for rescheduling with a minor fee.

A bit harsh compared to most other frequent flyer programs so do keep this in mind when booking far ahead.

Having purchased award flights on both British Airways Avios and American Airlines AAdvantage and have cancelled those award tickets before. Avios charged me a total of US$2.50 and I got back the 12.5k miles. AAdvantage charged me US$150 and I got back my 175k miles.

It might be like this for Enrich but not so for other frequent flyer programs.

Argh, was looking at a redemption for March flight, but looks like I won't have time to redeem for business class on MH, I'm still short of about 20k miles.

Sorry MH, looks like the rest of my TP will go to Krisflyer.

rjb123 already mentioned this, but from personal experience CX will release waitlisted flights. I've had CX business and first class open up close to flight time earlier. If you want you can search and book today and fly tomorrow as well. I did that with my KUL-JFK ticket on CX first last year

SQ may or may not release waitlisted Saver bookings. I've had SQ first JFK-SIN which never got released, so I ended up on IAH-SIN first instead.

There are operational upgrades where people get upgraded because economy is oversold or something along those lines. I got it on Emirates some years ago (economy to business) and on MH many many years ago. It's much more likely to happen if you're flying alone.

No real way to guarantee it though, it happened to me twice in > 20 years of flying so don't hope much.

What is your objective? If you're planning to redeem for award tickets and those 130k miles are not deep discount economy I recommend banking those miles with AAdvantage. AAdvantage has a far better redemption rate compared to Qatar or MH.

One way business KUL-LHR/CDG/AMS = 55k AAdvantage or 75k Qmiles
One way business KUL-JFK/LAX = 55k AAdvantage (~$50 in taxes/fees) or 95k Qmiles
One way first class KUL-JFK/LAX = 67.5k AAdvantage vs. 142.5k Qmiles
One way business DOH-KUL = 30k AAdvantage (~$25 in taxes/fees) or 50k QMiles

I've booked the last two before, planning to go to Europe sometime this year with my leftover AAdvantage miles. Taxes and fees are also pretty reasonable.

The key thing is your 130k miles flown on either MH or QR are not deep discount economy which only earn 25-50% miles.

This is basically what I'm doing for work for the past 6-7 years. Happy to answer questions if you have any.

Good point on the status challenge although I always thought that you'd have to on AA metal only for those miles so it may not apply to much to most people here.

Agreed on promo fares, but if I recall MH doesn't award Enrich on promo fares either.

Overall though I can't complain about AAdvantage, still makes more sense to me overall if the primary way of collecting miles is flying.

Unfortunately none in Malaysia. I have US-based credit cards that do although the current Maybank Premiere rates for KF/AM is better so I'm focusing on that right now.


This post has been edited by tishaban: Feb 22 2015, 06:57 AM

Good experience to share. I've never used Asia Miles previously, my local credit cards transfer to Krisflyer and Enrich and both were easy to deal with over the phone and online. I checked the Cathay website for available award flights and didn't see as many as I would've liked to the places I want to go to.

The biggest problem with Enrich today is the huge devaluation for medium and long haul premium flights. Anything above Zone 3 is far too expensive IMO. My long haul flights are frequently to the US and Europe so Krisflyer charges a bit less than Enrich for business/first plus SQ has far more flight options. I only have 600k TP to transfer so that's just enough for a nice return trip in business class to somewhere in the world.

Good luck.

Yes, the Maybank Premier cards are the best for air miles redemption for everyday spend. At roughly 3.7 KF/SQ/Enrich miles per USD it's even better than my US-based cards. Will park my US-based cards in my drawer while collecting my TP

I've never been in a FF program that allows a person to to accrue miles in another person's account. Each ticket can only collect miles for his or her own account, including Enrich so to me the email is not surprising to me.

There are some programs that allow a family to pool miles eg. Avios but I've not heard of Enrich doing this.

You can redeem miles for another person from your account, but accruing is different.

You can submit your boarding pass and claim your entitled Enrich miles after the fact, not at checkin but online but I've heard that it takes quite a bit of time for that to work.

Yes thank you Gen-X for lots of good tips.

Manufactured spend is a science, unfortunately not so easy to do cheaply in Malaysia. I've been on flyertalk for years and the tips there are a lot better than what you'd get from the typical blogger, highly recommend going straight to the source.

My TP have been going to KF for the past few months, have not touched Enrich for awhile and won't be going back due to the devaluation

For expensive tickets eg. first class, business class, full fare economy accrual is 100-200% or more of the actual miles flown. So assuming that KL to Seoul is say 3,500 miles one way, you get 3,500 Enrich/KF/etc miles if you buy an economy class ticket that accrues 100%, 7,000 miles one way if you buy a first class ticket that accrues 200% and everything else in between.

For most people flying cheapest economy class tickets though, you accrue 100% or 50% or even 0% Enrich miles on the cheapest tickets. That's what it means in a nutshell. Malaysia airlines has not looked into how much RM you spend, Singapore has started.

Reply is a bit late but the best way to redeem MH First Class on their A380 is via Avios or AAdvantage miles, not Enrich. I just checked and there's one open First Class seat on MH20 to CDG for only 90k Avios + US$23 (one way). If I called AAdvantage they'd sell me that ticket for 67.5k AAdvantage miles.

If you have Asia Miles you can also book One World partner airlines (including MH) so that's another option which is more valid for most people with Maybank Treatpoints or Citibank points and makes more sense than Enrich.

Anyway like some others here, I've given up on Enrich and am converting my TP to Asia Miles or possibly KF for the future. Good bye Enrich.


This post has been edited by tishaban: Apr 20 2015, 07:42 PM

There's really nothing to it You're welcome to post this on your blog by the way. Note I've not tried the second or last option personally, but that last one is definitely on my todo list this year.

Award ticket on Cathay, British Airways, Qantas, Dragon Air (online)

1. Login to your Asia Miles account

https://www.asiamiles.com/am/en/homepage

2. Go to the flight redemption

https://www.cathaypacific.com/cx/en_HK/book...redemption.html

3. Select the your origin and destination airports, dates, and booking class. Then click Search

Some options are next to impossible to get due to popularity. LHR is one of them where Economy and Business is almost always sold out. In this case Premium Economy might be an option.

4. Select flight options, book, pay with points.



Award ticket using Asia Miles on One World partners (via form) for one single airline. Works for MH, QR, JL and a few others

1. You need to check availability via Avios, then book using Asia Miles. Login to your Avios account

https://www.britishairways.com/travel/redee...cclub/_gf/en_us

2. Check availability segment by segment. Not a big deal if you're flying Malaysia eg. KUL-LHR is just that. However to choose Qatar KUL-LHR is KUL-DOH and DOH-LHR. Similarly KUL-JFK on Japan is KUL-NRT and NRT-JFK

3. Make sure there's enough time between flights, choose a minimum of 1.5 hours, maximum of 23 hours 59 minutes

4. Note these segments down and the available seats on the Avios site. Once you have them:

5. Go to Asia Miles

https://www.asiamiles.com/am/en/homepage

6. Find out how many miles those flights will cost. Use the Add Sector to plug in individual sectors.

https://www.asiamiles.com/am/en/redeem/flig...t=RHRedeemMiles

7. Fill in the form with the correct segments and submit it.

https://www.asiamiles.com/am/en/redeem/flights/form


To truly maximize Asia Miles with multi-carrier stopovers & open jaws

1. Asia Miles allows 5 stopovers, 2 open jaws for a multi-carrier award.

https://www.asiamiles.com/am/en/redeem/charts#4

2. The specifics are very open but you could technically do a simple itinerary like the following:

KUL-NRT on JL (stopover in Tokyo)
NRT-SFO on JL (stopover in San Francisco)
SFO-JFK on AA (destination New York)

BOS-HKG on CX (stopover in Hong Kong)
HKG-KUL on CX

which is just 3 stopovers and 1 open jaw over roughly 20,000 miles flown which would cost 95k Asia Miles in economy or 140k Asia Miles in business class.

3. As usual find availability per segment on either Avios (see example above) or Qantas (google up how to do this). Unfortunately this cannot be done online, but once you've discovered the available segments you can do it over the phone.

Searching for award flights

1. There are 3 major airline alliances today, One World (including MH Enrich and CX Asia Miles), Star Alliance (including SQ KF) and Skyteam

2. For One World, Avios (mentioned above) is one way to do a search. Qantas is another. For Star Alliance, United's MileagePlus works well as does ANA. These are free, but may not be optimal when searching across date ranges.

3. Alternatively there are others eg. AwardNexus, KVS and ExpertFlyer. All are paid options and allow a lot more flexibility than the free ones.

4. Specifically for Asia Miles and to a lesser extent Enrich, Awardnexus is an search tool to search for CX or other One World awards, it's much easier than poking around Avios or Qantas websites. It's not free but with a flyertalk membership you can receive free points for a limited number of searches.

https://awardnexus.com/

Award availability on CX with Asia Miles

1. For all routes, CX will release award seats 360 days in advance primarily. I believe it's typically 2 biz seats and 1 first class seats per flight which are open for award booking in the beginning almost 1 year in advance.

2. At roughly 7-14 days before the flight, more business/first class seats are open depending on whether or not they're sold. Finally at about 24-72 hours before the flight all except 1 seat in business/first are available for award booking. Note this may not apply to popular routes (LHR/CDG/LAX/JFK) but I've seen this frequently enough.

3. Asia Miles does allow you to waitlist on an award ticket on a Cathay flight, this is a big advantage over what you can get on Cathay via Avios or other OneWorld points.


This post has been edited by tishaban: Apr 21 2015, 01:07 PM

If it doesn't say waitlisted then you're confirmed a seat even on the standard/lowest tier. When the plane is full the Tier 1 and Tier 2 won't get confirmed seats either but once something opens up they'll be higher priority than standard ones. Tier 1 and Tier 2 are for economy/premium economy only, not business though.

CDG is unfortunately like LAX/LHR/JFK/NRT/AMS ie. one of the most popular segments. I don't fly to Europe much anymore but when I did do so on paid tickets places like Amsterdam would be constantly fully booked in business class even when I was willing to pay real money. You might get lucky with Qatar or Gulf Air, both OneWorld but that takes a call instead of online booking.

Asia Miles fortunately doesn't charge close in booking fee. Some airlines eg. AA will charge anything between $25-75 if you book less than 3 weeks from flight date.

One more tip, after you've signed up for flyertalk, go sign up for awardnexus.

https://awardnexus.com/

Awardnexus is an award search tool, you can use it to search for CX or other One World awards much easier than poking around Avios or Qantas websites. It's not free but every quarter you get a set number of points. Each search you do costs a certain amount of points but it's a huge time saver compared to the Avios website.

Using awardnexus I see that there are zero HKG-LHR flights available in early June for example

For all routes, CX will release award seats 360 days in advance primarily. Once the allocation for award seats are gone, unsold business/first class seats are released as award seats as late as 24 or 48 hours before a flight.


This post has been edited by tishaban: Apr 21 2015, 07:39 AM

I poked around and there are options. Maybe you need to check several other dates.

I've done red eye flights from Beijing to KL on the A330, the angle flat is about as bad as the ones on the MH 772 ie. it's good for relaxing, not great for sleeping.

I don't think there's much choice if you want to fly MH though, have not tried JAL's sky suite on their 767 from KUL-NRT yet.