MilesBuzz! - NW, DL or AA for award travel to England?

I have miles on these three airlines and was wondering, in general, which one offers the most Y seats from USA to England? I'll be leaving from BOI. Checking 10 months out, all three seem to have "some" seats available. Travel will be during May or Sept., 2009 or 2010. From what I've read on the different forums I'm guessing the consensus will pick AA.

TIA,
Phil

I have miles on these three airlines and was wondering, in general, which one offers the most Y seats from USA to England? I'll be leaving from BOI. Checking 10 months out, all three seem to have "some" seats available. Travel will be during May or Sept., 2009 or 2010. From what I've read on the different forums I'm guessing the consensus will pick AA.

TIA,
Phil

correct :)

And therefore, since you are able to book so far in advance and you are finding some availability on DL and NW also: you should book on one of those two airlines and rid yourself of their difficult to use miles. Save your easy to use AA miles for a really difficult route such as to Tokyo or Buenos Aires or Johannesburg where AA really shines. Nowadays, going to London is like walking across the street.




correct :)

And therefore, since you are able to book so far in advance and you are finding some availability on DL and NW also: you should book on one of those two airlines and rid yourself of their difficult to use miles. Save your easy to use AA miles for a really difficult route such as to Tokyo or Buenos Aires or Johannesburg where AA really shines. Nowadays, going to London is like walking across the street.

Thanks for this sage advice, JohnWM.

Keep in mind AA offers off-peak awards for 40K between Oct 15 and May 15, so you can save 20,000 miles if your travel dates fall in that range.

And therefore, since you are able to book so far in advance and you are finding some availability on DL and NW also: you should book on one of those two airlines and rid yourself of their difficult to use miles. Save your easy to use AA miles for a really difficult route such as to Tokyo or Buenos Aires or Johannesburg where AA really shines. Nowadays, going to London is like walking across the street.

Agreed. I found that using Delta miles to get a non-stop Air France ticket from San Francisco to Paris, and then on to Bucharest, was quite easy 331 days out. Nice business class flight, too. Northwest may also be able to get you onto that airline.

Thanks Gary & Tom. I usually try to make award rez. 331 days out. Good ideas.

Phil

NW BOI-MSP-LHR
AA BOI-LAX-LHR

AF BOI-XXX-CDG-XXX

all 3 have lieflat in J as well

If you already know 10 months out plus then you'll be fine on any of them off peak. I would agree, hold the AA miles for more exotic trips. I used my AA miles for a Hawaii trip during spring break with the beloved friday departure and saturday return. Six months out, this trip booked out at over $2000 lowest economy class. AA came through with seats in their mile saver award and we even scored vouchers for giving up our award seats and leaving the next day.

Best way to book skymile seats is very far out or very close to the flight date. Delta allows you to book 331 days in advance. You could find lots of skymile availability if you check within the first few weeks after the schedule has been released. Finding a skymile seat can be challenging but doable after that. Lots of seats will open up again within 1 - 3 months of departure depending on the market and the season. Reason for this is simple... through out the year revenue management seems to concentrate on the closer departures to figure out how to fill the remaining seats to maximize profit. Once they figure they can not fill every seat they will allow miles to be used...

There is a route however which is ALWAYS available... it is booked with Delta SM miles on CO from EWR to BRS (bristol)... this route seems to be always available through out the year. Usually booking inta Europe flights is not a problem unless it is with KLM. The transatlantic routes are the difficult ones. Aeroflot sometimes have transatlantic routes available when nobody else does... because not many people think of them as a back door into europe or don't like the thought of flying with a russian airlines.

DL is starting to pop award tickets on TATL routes with massive surcharges, the only US airline doing so. At this point, it is only for travel ex-EU, but it shows the best reason to burn your DL miles first while they are still worth something. And DL may take over NW, subjecting those miles to the same crap. Even so, DL will still pop you for some junk fees that other airlines don't, but this is only going to get much worse later.

There is also a huge tax to ''save the planet by discouraging air travel'' (or so Gordon Brown justified it) for flights leaving the UK. If I were planning a TATL flight from the US to UK, I would do an open jaws with the return from somewhere else (just not the Netherlands, where the center-left government is doing the same thing) in Europe, and bridge the gap with a cheap LCC flight. That huge tax is bigger still if you are up front instead of in steerage.

...all 3 have lieflat in J as wellNot necessarily for AA. Their fleet conversion isn't complete. No matter what their planned rollout schedule is for the time between now and the flight, and no matter what kind of aircraft flies that route today, things can change. If this is a big factor, the only way to be certain is to fly an airline that has lie-flat seats in J throughout its entire international fleet today.

(Also, AA's J seats are "flat" but not horizontal. Some people find it harder to sleep with their feet lower than their head.)

good to know. if one was worried about that, they could go with NW.

when is AA scheduled to be done?

also "lieflat" and "flatbed" are used to differentiate.

Greetings Phil,

I don't have advice on Y class, don't even know what it is. Since you are trying far into the feature you can be picky.

AA has more options but Summer 2008 AAadvantage trip US - LHR cost typically 60,000 miles, and comes with an awkard connection! Example: DTW-LHR in July is 60 K (return lhr-jfk, lga-dtw or a night layover in NY).

I have been checking for weeks on NW too, and found NW open for many dates, all 50 K return. I'm a hamppy camper with NW and booked 2 tickets @ 50K each, and DTW-LHR nonstop!

Usually it is not a simple answer to know whihc one is better.
Thanks for this sage advice, JohnWM.

for NW OP would want BOI-MSP-LHR

And therefore, since you are able to book so far in advance and you are finding some availability on DL and NW also: you should book on one of those two airlines and rid yourself of their difficult to use miles. Save your easy to use AA miles for a really difficult route such as to Tokyo or Buenos Aires or Johannesburg where AA really shines. Nowadays, going to London is like walking across the street.

To lump DL and NW together is a rather unfair statement. Yes, DL award redemption is like playing Russian Roulette with a .44 Magnum but availability on NW is usually pretty wide open. I have never failed to snag NW award seats, especially if I had a little flexibility here and there. On highly popular city pairs you may have to go with PerkPass as PerkSaver may be gone but that doesn't happen often. If the PerkPass 'costs' too much in terms of cpm then I will probably book a paid ticket and save the miles for next time. This is a good tool for the person that hardly ever flies NW but has some miles as they never expire. That cannot be said for many other airlines.

I do agree that AA is pretty easy to redeem award miles with but if your ITIN is anything other than standard RT then you have to pay the $15 per ticket for the phone-in game. I could book open jaw paid tix MIA-VVI-EZE-MIA but to book my award tix for CowDo I had to call in.

when is AA scheduled to be done?The 767s are all done or nearly so now. 777s are about 60 percent done now. There's a current, active thread on this topic in the AA forum here. (http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/showthread.php?t=780823) Given that the recent MD-80 kerfuffle cost them an estimated $30 million and that they also want to accelerate fleet replacement because of high fuel costs, earlier estimates of when they would finish might be out the window. The only thing that's real is how many have the new "NGBC" seats now.

also "lieflat" and "flatbed" are used to differentiate.That usage isn't universal. For example, the SkyTrax First and Business Class Airline Seat Guide (http://www.flatseats.com/Reviews/A-Z-Business.htm) calls a seat that makes a straight, but not horizontal, surface an "angled lie-flat seat." It reserves the term "lie-flat seat" (without the word "angled") for the horizontal type only, and does not use the term "flat-bed" at all. We should try to avoid preaching, or assuming that our understanding of a term is necessarily everyone's.

thanks for the AA info

ive only seen a handful of people on flyertalk not use the wording i gave, but im not that active in the airline forums