Recently joined GSM team at Apple. Will be travelling frequently to HK and Shanghai. Any recommendations on United vs Cathay. Which has better inflight services and rewards program(especially for travel to India) Full Disclosure - Indian guy looks to collect points to visit back. TC - 200k
Cathay
United is 🗑
Fly Cathay. Deposit your miles with Alaska. Use them to redeem on Emirates for trips to India.
Details please on how to do it
You get something like 225% miles flown when crediting Cathay business class to Alaska Airlines. Probably more once you get status I.e. flying 75K+ miles per year. So you’ll need to create an Alaska airlines frequent flyer account and credit your flights to it. You can then redeem those miles for Alaska partner airlines including Emirates. Don’t discount United though. Depends how often you travel and cost of your tickets you can potentially earn a lot of United miles for paid business class. Up to 11x (I think) per dollar spent on each ticket once you get 1K status (flying 100K miles per year). United is a member of star alliance which has a lot of options to India.
Cathay! They will treat you like royalty 👍🏾
I see a vast majority voting Cathay, How is their rewards program especially when travelling to India
You don’t want to credit to their own award program. Better to credit to Alaska (as stated above) or American Airlines.
United but only for sfo to hkg. The polaris point is choice. Better plane and rewards. Once you hit 1k fly Singapore airlines obviously.
If you have Singapore airlines option, go for it. They have service to Hong Kong. Also, Singapore airlines is much better option for India compared to Cathay.
Fly cathay. Use american airlines AA frequent flier program. There are lot of airlines u can redeeem the AA miles on.
Cathay all the way