Has anyone used their United frequent flyer miles to fly to Riga?  If so, how far in advance did you call and what was your routing?

I’ve been hoarding my United miles for years, and thanks to crediting SAS flights (same alliance) to my United account, I now have a very healthy balance (i.e. more than enough to get me to Europe).  I haven’t called United yet, as I know that this can be a bit of a painful process—getting customer service reps who aren’t at all helpful, having to hang up and call again, etc.  So I was wondering if any LOLers had done this recently.

The most annoying thing is that getting a flight with only one connection may be very difficult. Air Baltic, although it is a SAS partner, is not a Star Alliance airline, so one cannot use United miles to fly from the US through Copenhagen or Stockholm and then onto Riga.  I downloaded a bunch of info from the Star Alliance website today, and the vast majority of the routings include flying through 2 cities.  If I were planning a 10 or 14 day vacation, I wouldn’t mind so much to spend more time traveling, but my hoped-for trip in October would be a very quick 4 or so days. 

Daina, although I have not yet used my United miles to fly to Latvia, I do accumulate them on Lufthansa, a United parner and my choice of travel to Latvia. Lufthansa/United do fly from Boston as well as from Washington to Riga with one stop connection in Frankfurt. I believe that you can arrange for travel with frequent flyer miles through the internet.
Happy traveling,
Lauris

Daina,

I’ve done it once before, using frequent flyer miles to fly to Europe, not Riga though.  I recommend you do it well in advance (maybe 6 months) and expect to be flexible on flying dates and maybe even routing.

Back then, I called, but now you should be able to do it online, as Lauris suggests, from the United website.

I am a frequent flyer with Air Canada, usually flying to Europe with Lufthansa from Boston, but occasionally flying with United.  They are all part of the same alliance.

Just for fun, I was able to find flights to Riga in November out of Toronto and Montreal using Air Canada miles online.  The flights offered included Lufthansa, United, USAir and of course Air Canada.

Good Luck!
Pierre

Other than LOL, the only other Internet forum that I read on a regular basis (and now participate in occasionally) is one on flying/traveling.  The United frequent flyers there refer the United.com as “United.bomb” because of its poor quality. One thing you cannot do on the United website is book or even search for non-United award tickets—in other words, if I’m interested in flying one of United’s Star Alliance partner airlines, I must pick up the phone and call the award desk, I cannot do it online. 

And regarding timing of the request—the prevailing school of thought is to do it as far as advance as possible (330 days before hand is when they release award ticket seats), or shortly before the hoped-for-trip, as award seats often open up last minute.  Another often-heard piece of advice is to basically call the airline and check every couple of days, as you never know when something might open up.

For me the advance planning on this trip was not possible, as the reason for flying to Latvia in October is to bury my father’s urn.  He passed away in February—as with most deaths, the date was not know beforehand.  I just received word from my mother today that the exact date has been finally set—she’d been waiting for confirmation from the pastor in Jelgava.

Anyway, maybe I’ll make my initial call tonight.  If I have any interesting experience or tips, I’ll let you all know.

Just a quick update for anyone interested.  United freq. flyer miles and the Star Alliance may *seem* like a great thing, but when you’re trying to get to Riga...not so great.

The positive thing is that I do have a reservation on hold for the exact days that I wanted.

Negative: routing not ideal.  My outbound is Washington Dulles - Vienna (on Austrian), Vienna - Riga (Austrian/Tyrolean, but on a smaller plane which I greatly dislike).  My return is Riga - Frankfurt (Lufthansa), Frankfurt - Toronto (Air Canada), Toronto - Baltimore (AC, again on a smaller plane which I’m not a fan of, and arriving at 11:30pm).  Not only does the return trip take about 19 hrs, but it puts me at a different airport than where I started, meaning I can’t drive myself to the airport and park there.

The biggest problem w/ Star Alliance is that Air Baltic is not a part of it.  And Air Baltic has a pretty good hold on RIX - Europe flights.  For example, I could get to Amsterdam or Brussels on United, but getting from either of those places on a Star Alliance airline would mean flying Lufthansa through Frankfurt.  However, the AMS and BRU flights from the States get in too late for a traveler to be able to make a same day Frankfurt connection.

My reservation is on hold til Monday night the 24th, so I’ll keep calling United to see if anything better has opened up (particularly for the return trip).  But if nothing has, I will ticket this, as the option of buying a flight is a difficult to justify for 3 days on the ground in Latvia.

Daina,

Sorry to hear of your loss.  Thank you for the update, as I know I will be doing something similar to you in the foreseeable future.

Luckily for me, Air Canada now allows for booking air mile flights on all (most?) Star Alliance carriers, a relatively recent development I believe.  We’ll see how far that gets me when the time comes.

Indeed, a number of people get confused over Air Baltic’s affiliation with Star Alliance, or lack thereof, since the SAS logo appears on their planes.

Pierre

Well since I’ve now spent hours and hours researching travel between UK and Riga, I think I can weigh in on this with some good information.

I have looked up and compared which airlines fly in and out of Riga and which out of airports in Edinbugh, Glasgow, and the three London airports.  Interestingly enough, if you can get a free ticket with your miles into one of the London airports, you can likely get a flight to Riga through RyanAir or EasyJet into Riga for as little as $50-$70 round trip, depending on the date.  It’s fairly easy as most incoming international flights from the US seem to arrive in London in the early-mid morning time.  So you have all day to schedule a connection.

Glasgow is a bit out of the way, but where we’ve finally decided my daughter will attend university, thus my knowledge on this.:) KLM lies out of Glasgow to Riga and we’ve found some very good deals with them as well.

Daina, give the London connection a try.

Thanks for the advice, Susanna, but it came a bit too late. I ticketed my reservation already.  But I also wanted to get ‘bang for my buck’—if I’m going to spend 50,000 hard earned frequent flyer miles to get to Europe, I’d like them to get me aaallll the way to my destination, even if it is ‘out of the way’ RIX. :) I’ll be calling United on a regular basis and crossing my fingers (plus ‘holding my thumbs!’) that the Frankfurt - Dulles flight does open up.