I just booked a cruise that leaves from San Juan, PR next January. I can get two round trip 1st Class tickets to San Juan on Continental for 60K miles each, which is a pretty good deal. Now comes the news that UAL is about to merge with Continental. I’m not concerned about whether the respective Frequent Flyer programs will some how merge, but being that the trip is 9 months away, I’m concerned that the Continental flights I book today won’t be there in January and whether UAL will get me to destination in 1st Class on the days I need to travel. Whatchathink, risky?
Typically frequent flyer mile programs merge as well. This has been the case with many of the mergers of airlines within the past 10 years.
Your second concern is valid, but since you will have a valid ticket for a valid flight, if the merged airline decides to cancel your flight, they will have to either refund your miles or book you on another similar flight.
According to the merger website, you can continue making reservations as you normally do.
Interestingly enough, the FAQ page even has the question of whether you can now combine the miles on both a Continental and United account, except that they don’t actually answer their own posted question saying some vagary about how some great new program is coming soon.
So the question remains, if it is 30,000 miles for a free coach ticket on the new airline, and I have 10,000 pre-merger miles on Continental and 20,000 on United, post merger at the end of the year, will I have enough for a free ticket under the new program?
I doubt specific questions like these can be answered until the deal gets done, which could be quite a while. I’ll probably take the risk with my trip figuring UAL wouldn’t want the customer ill will.
The merger won’t be complete until later this year, at earliest. Even then it will be months after that point before flights will be effected. The only thing I would even be slightly concerned about is if the two airlines competed directly on the same route. If you are originating in San Diego, I would guess there will be no elimination of the flights on that trip.
When Delta and Northwest merged, there was a long delay (at least several months) after the merger occurred before the two frequent-flyer programs merged, and that process took a long time.