I buy Starpoints to redeem for hotel stays only. Others here sometimes use it to convert to air miles. Starwood offers a great transfer bonus: for every 20,000 Starwood points you transfer to any partner airline in a single transaction, you’ll receive a 25% mileage bonus. 25,000 airmiles for 20,000 SPG points/

How best to utilise depends again on where you want to go and which airlines.

Whether to use cash or points depends really.

Let's take an extreme example.

A stay in St Regis New York in April next year will cost you USD1,300 nett/night. Or you can use 30k starpoints which only equates to USD682.50 under the current 35% promotion.

But with the Marriott takeover you can convert 24k starpoints to Marriott Reward Points and stay at the Ritz-Carlton Central Park. Or stay 5 nights and get the 5th night free under either SPG or Marriott. This would bring the points required down even more for a stay in an aspirational 5-star property.

A more common scenario would be like when I used 3k starpoints to book a stay at Aloft KL during a busy weekend last Oct when rates were hovering above RM600 a night.

SPG enables one to attain Platinum through only 25 stays or 50 nights. With this, you're matched to Marriott's Platinum Elite which normally requires 75 nights. I'm sticking to SPG for now until further news on the program's future.

I suspect most here would be converting into air miles for business/first class flights which makes much more (economic) sense than hotel night redemptions.

Yes, just select 5 nights and you'll see the Starpoints rate per night drop automatically.

StR KL can be booked for less than RM700 sometimes and definitely not worth spending 20k a night. Ritz-Carlton Langkawi maybe?

SQ going through changes for Star Alliance redemption... i believe now we can see *A carrier listing for FF redemption.

However, rates are going up for *A redemption... as usual.

They're also going to charge cash or points for call center transaction. Service fee will be waived for transactions that cannot be done online.

Let's see how the online redemption process is first. There are simple ways to search for *A availability online. I don't see much value there. Calling SQ has been relatively painless thus far. Agreed though, online redemption is definitely welcomed.

learned my lesson oledi... actually it is booked thru travel agent...

actually other airlines ie. SQ is more attractive in terms of rates and service and aircraft... so if MAS continue to be so LCLY, she will suffer in long run after all customers abandon ship

yup. flying on mas because of Patriotism, but the level MAS is doing business will only push would be customers further and further away

About 10-15%?

I see KUL-LHR business class devalued to 184k miles (from 170k miles)

sigh.... tried to convert to 1000 Asiamiles from my maybank american express from the 2 cards but didn't get the extra 15% miles.

Dunno should convert to Asiamiles or KF....AM got extra 15% but was thinking accumulate more Krisflyer for the suite...

Other than Cathay P, are there any first/biz class to Europe that are good and available from AM?

Helps if it is also easier to book

If I am offered to pay S$3,210 cc annual fee to gain 150,000 KF miles, which is equivalent to S$0.0214 or MYR$0.0642 per miles....

Is that worth it?

Unfortunately too "spontaneous".....only for travel in March....

Hi everyone, I'm a total newbie to KF redemption and have been reading up on the Waitlist system but wanted to seek your advice before I commit to converting all my TPs to KF.

Situation: I need to book one ticket from KL to Paris / Amsterdam in December (peak Christmas period) and don't really care whether its J or Y class (although preference is J if available). After arriving in Paris / Amsterdam, I will book a separate low-cost flight to my destination city (a small city in France).

Flights to Paris are generally "Not Available" or "Waitlisted" (for both J and Y), while there are some Available Y flights to Amsterdam (however, not on my preferred dates).

Questions:

1. Can I first waitlist all my preferred flights (e.g. J and Y to Paris, J and Y to Amsterdam) then CONFIRM an available Y to Amsterdam (which is not on my preferred date)?  On a worst case scenario, I don't mind taking the Y to Amsterdam flight, but if my waitlisted flights become available, can I change to one of those instead? If so, what are the procedures and extra charges?

2. Has anyone had experience being on KF waitlist for Y to Europe during peak holiday period?  If so, what is the "normal" wait time?  I don't know if I should just CONFIRM the Y ticket to Amsterdam, or try my luck with the waitlist for my preferred flights?

3. Is there a "better" way to get to Europe with roughly the same number of points (e.g. 73k for Y, 184k for J), but without the uncertainty of the waitlist system? 

Sorry if my questions are very ignorant, but I would greatly appreciate any guidance you could provide, or even point me to some reading material for me to educate myself.  Thanks in advance.

Recently been pretty difficult to redeem good seats on MH and the miles also increased substantially compared to last year. I did a quick comparison, Asia Miles can be 20-30% cheaper than MAS for a comparable route (HKG-KUL or HKG-LHR). Therefore I have decided to forego collecting Enrich, and start collecting AM instead. The change to revenue-based system for Enrich totally killed the system.

Thanks everyone for your tips, I really appreciate the help, especially as I'm pretty new to this and have only redeemed airmiles (Enrich) a couple of times on Y in the past (which took me forever to accumulate, as I used to spend on M2Plat + other cashback cards).  Now I've switched spending to M2Premier, I have some hope of getting J tickets before my TPs expire.

My miles are not expiring (as I haven't converted my TPs yet) so I still have flexibility.

Economy ticket on my preferred dates would cost RM3.6k which is still pretty cheap, whist Y redemption (1 day off from my preferred date) is 76k miles + RM212 only.

Dilemma is now whether I want to be generous by gifting a J ticket and going through the hassle of waitlist / checking flights, or just be cheap and burn some miles on Y redemption which would take me about 2-3 months to accumulate the required TPs.  If I was the traveller, I would definitely go all out to get my J ticket!

Not me or my kids, so I'm a little more cheapo. 

But of course, still worth it to do research and learn how to get value redemptions instead of just settling on most obvious routes.

SA devaluation is expected after KF own devaluation early this year. You can still book a few routes on SA which is cheaper than SIA before 16 April. Most of the SA flight will be equivalent to KF own chart after this.