AFF Status Runs Spreadsheet

[murraygusto]

Hoping to at least hit gold, I meant. Damn iPhone auto correct!

 

[samh004]

samh004, cheers for that. After posting, I did a bit more reading and realized that it was a post # based criteria. All good

With my current travel planned for the next month, I should be able to get platinum if I book business for all of them. But my credit card may not appreciate that so much haha.

I'm Sydney based, and I'm finding the better status run options are more available from other cities.

Ultimately, I'm hoping to at least tea h hold by August when I head over to Europe as I'll be doing lots of flying between cities and layovers.

Will have a glance through some other threads.

Cheers again.

Have you considered booking a one-way out of SYD to you destination and then a return (with a future date to head back) business award. I believe, but not sure as VA isn't me, that you can earn points and status on award flights till mid-year. This way, if there's a better deal in the other direction, or via another destination (common mantra: why fly direct when you can connect), then you'll get there faster, while admittedly spending points, but also gaining points and SC!

Good luck.

 

[murraygusto]

Have you considered booking a one-way out of SYD to you destination and then a return (with a future date to head back) business award. I believe, but not sure as VA isn't me, that you can earn points and status on award flights till mid-year. This way, if there's a better deal in the other direction, or via another destination (common mantra: why fly direct when you can connect), then you'll get there faster, while admittedly spending points, but also gaining points and SC!

Good luck.

Unfortunately, I don't have many points accrued. Until recently I've been loyal with Qantas, but a friend pointed out that climbing the status ladder will be far more fruitful with Velocity. Plus despite a busy traveling few months coming up, and crunching some numbers, I tend to agree. With my business Europe trip in August, there'll be no doubt I'll be at least Gold and nearly Platinum. With Qantas, I think that would probably just scrape me over Gold with no Platinum in reasonable sight.

So it'll all be cash bookings for now, which I'm fine with. I'm just looking for good ways to at least reach Gold before August so I can enjoy the lounges in transit. I'll be at lots of airports (it's a DJ tour).

Great tip. I'll look at what cities have good status run options and fly in there. I'm already flying to OOL, CBR and MEL in the next 4 weeks, all business, so I'll see what decent options I can get from those cities.

MH

 

[DeKa]

Sign up for the Virgin Flyer card. 30000 points for $129. That gives you plenty of headroom to start looking at rewards. Take someone else with you on the 2 for 1 offer and credit their points and SCs to you as well, and you're well on your way.

 

[Bolthead]

.......Take someone else with you on the 2 for 1 offer and credit their points and SCs to you as well.......

Make sure they meet the T&C of family pooling first!!

 

[SilverShadow]

Can I ask a bit of a noob question and that is why do people think the airlines would have issues with this? It's data that's available after a lot of searching so I don't see why the airlines should have trouble with it - then again! I have some concepts but not sure if that's what people are thinking too.

Anyway - this democratising of the data is brilliant. Thanks Lobo!

 

[BrentH]

Can I ask a bit of a noob question and that is why do people think the airlines would have issues with this? It's data that's available after a lot of searching so I don't see why the airlines should have trouble with it

There have been some fares published in the document that the airlines would have run at a *significant* loss. That was the main reason for the spreadsheet's creation.

 

[SilverShadow]

I was thinking along the lines of cost competitiveness and avoiding having many people qualifying for Gold/Plat haha!

Thanks for sharing

 

[Deleted member 29185]

I was thinking along the lines of cost competitiveness and avoiding having many people qualifying for Gold/Plat haha!

Thanks for sharing

Personally, I think VA in particular were very used to implementation with little no real experience, then let AFF find the loopholes, then take that info and close the loopholes. Someone doing their work for them, for free.

Most sane airlines probably accept the occasional stuff-ups without too much fanfare, but VA have a history of potentially expensive stuff ups with little or no R&D budget and still act LCC when it comes to correction policies. All the spreadsheet does, is keep it a little more "in-house" for our benefit a bit longer than it might otherwise have lasted.

 

[burmans]

Personally, I think VA in particular were very used to implementation with little no real experience, then let AFF find the loopholes, then take that info and close the loopholes. Someone doing their work for them, for free.

Most sane airlines probably accept the occasional stuff-ups without too much fanfare, but VA have a history of potentially expensive stuff ups with little or no R&D budget and still act LCC when it comes to correction policies. All the spreadsheet does, is keep it a little more "in-house" for our benefit a bit longer than it might otherwise have lasted.

Was wondering this myself, it may be cheaper tp let your "users" beta test the website than do it yourself even if you have to "pay" via some cheap flights!

 

[Fruitcake]

Most sane airlines probably accept the occasional stuff-ups without too much fanfare, but VA have a history of potentially expensive stuff ups with little or no R&D budget and still act LCC when it comes to correction policies.

Exactly. Very LCC of them to send those e-mails out to people who booked $100 J fares to DPS acknowledging a mistake had been made but pointing out that the fare would be honoured . Just like those bookings for sub-$1000 Asia-Europe or Asia-South America F flights on MI ex-RGN on highly regarded legacy airlines were all faithfully honoured.

Oh wait, no they weren't, lots of them were cancelled without notification. Or a few years back when AA were selling deep-discount Y fares in their codeshares as F seats on QF services. Those also got cancelled.

I agree that VA seem very inexperienced at loading fares into the GDS but I think it's pretty unfair to say that they have no right to correct them (no matter where they find out about them), or that mistake fares are incredibly rare and no-one other than airlines "new" to GDSs make them. AA invented GDSs and they have had plenty of mistake fares themselves over the years. Locally, QF had a lot of dramas with pricing of EK codeshares - although those mistakes that I saw were all to the upside.

 

[777]

Exactly. Very LCC of them to send those e-mails out to people who booked $100 J fares to DPS acknowledging a mistake had been made but pointing out that the fare would be honoured .

As someone who benefited from this, i have to say their correction policy has been the best handled thing over the last few months. No complaints whatsoever from me.

 

[Gold Member]

OK folks I've completed the 'Other/Partners Runs' sheet. Changes made include:

1) Deleted temporary test data up top,
2) Gone through all the fares and tried to replicate the same fare using the Airlines' website to derive the local currency so that the forex table can be used. BTW, I've made some notes in the comments for fares that I can't find or changed due to different prices so please check these changes are OK,
3) Separated the forex table into a separate sheet so that we can now sort,
4) Added MYR currency to the forex sheet, and
5) Sorted the sheet based on $/SC with conditional colour formatting.

Please let me know if there any other changes you want incorporated....

Cheers, GM.

 

[pythonisman]

3) Separated the forex table into a separate sheet so that we can now sort,

Great, I was hoping you would

I was waiting for you to finish what you were doing so I didn't throw you off, but FYI I added a function to pull currency data down live from Google Finance (may not be bang on, but it should be pretty close to it).
I haven't done it before, but I believe the prices will update every time the sheet is opened (not sure if you have to actually browse to the Forex workbook, or if just opening the whole sheet will do). I added that function in as a row on the inverse, i.e. "1 AUD = ? forex), which is pulled from Google. Then I added a formula to auto-update the numbers you had.

Hope this helps - Let me know if you'd like me to change or revert it.

Also not sure what was up with E13, but I did notice there were two formatting conditions for $/SC 3.01 ≤ 5, so I adjusted that.

Pretty sure I made it in/out without breaking anything

By the way, have I missed something in this thread - is there any reason there are two copies of the "must read first" page?

 

[Gold Member]

I spent about 10 minutes trying to work out how to use the excel dynamic function to pull in live data streams and integrate it into our SS but hit a dead end in the FAQ when it said Google no longer supported this. If you've got it working then by all means! Lets see how it goes and then decide whether to retain or not.

I think I managed to fix E13 myself just as you were looking at it... Overlapping conditions.

 

[jneufeld]

How do you book E19, I can't seem to force AA.com to find that fare. Can't find it on ITA either. Any ideas?

 

[Gold Member]

You should be able to find it on Matrix, but it might not run every day, or one of the legs may be seasonal. On AA.com, I assume you've tried plugging them all in via multi-city?

 

[BrentH]

You should be able to find it on Matrix, but it might not run every day, or one of the legs may be seasonal. On AA.com, I assume you've tried plugging them all in via multi-city?

I tried multi-city earlier today and couldn't get the prices.

Didnt try matrix though.

Edit: Had a fish through Matrix, and the best I could find was 2 stops for ~$1k.

P.S. thanks GM for all your work on the report!

 

[Gold Member]

I tried multi-city earlier today and couldn't get the prices.

Didnt try matrix though.

I just tried matrix across several dates throughout 2013 and could not find it on any given day. It may not be available now, or ever again, or maybe it will show up at a later date when AA's system update with seasonal schedule or sommat. But I do believe that it was once bookable, and I'm not disputing the legitimacy of the route and price.

Fifa, care to share when you found/booked it?

 

[DC3]

E19 on ITA Matrix on 15 May, for example, works out at about $76 more than the spread sheet example, one way. Not quite the price in the spread sheet, but not that much more. Only looked in May, June, July and Aug but it is that price on each Thu, Fri, Sat and Sun.