Diners Club Club Rewards - Cashing in ... take advantage of BA offer?

Howdy folks,

I have about 140k diners points that I'd like to cash in before I cancel the card. I'm looking at the BA deal, with the 50% bonus I'd get around 200k miles.

My only concern is that I live in Seattle and rarely fly BA. Still, I can think of quite a few European vacations I'd like to take, and at 50k miles a pop (I just priced a trip from Seattle to Amsterdam), I'd get 4 round-trip tickets. Not bad.

Is there any reason why I shouldn't get the miles on BA, rather than putting them on American (my usual airline)? From BAs site, it seems I can use BA miles for OneWorld partner flights (though I don't know the details).

There are some good redemption values in the BA program.

Keep in mind most air travel awards using BA miles, including the 50,000 mile economy class award from North America to Europe 1 you refer to, have really high co-pays (aka fuel surcharge, tax, fees).

For example, I redeemed a round trip ticket from North America to Asia in economy class for 50,000 miles, CX outbound, JL return. The co-pay was over $350.

As of today, the co-pays using AA miles are substantially lower.

I went on the BA site and priced out a round-trip economy class award from SEA to LHR and the co-pay is $565.35. For SEA to FRA via LHR, it's $635.65.

I think a better use of BA miles is the C award from North America to Europe 1 or Asia.

Wow - thanks for the heads-up. I didn't have enough BA miles to get far enough into the transaction to see the co-pays - just the number of miles. Too good to be true I guess.

I'm used to the $10 I pay to redeem a Southwest Award or the $75 I think I paid for an AA award from ORD - UIO.

The fees are the worst on flights to Europe (ie, on flights on BA itself). There's closer to AA (even if still not as low as AA), on flights to Asia, on, say, CX (Cathay Pacific).

If you are going to fly BA, another thing to consider (that might be a better value sometimes, both considering the fees and considering how it stretches your miles) is buying premium economy (World Traveler Plus) and then using miles to upgrade to business (Club World). If you can do this, your miles will last nearly forever, as from US west coast you earn back (from the paid ticket and COS bonus) a substantial part of the miles you burned on the upgrade. And unlike normal economy, BA doesn't penalize you (in terms of miles earned) when you buy premium economy at sale fares.

An economy fair from Seattle to Amsterdam is $1300 for an 8 day trip, and double that for premium economy. Yowzers. I originally figured I could find a round-trip economy fare for under $1k, or nearly free with miles.

An economy fair from Seattle to Amsterdam is $1300 for an 8 day trip, and double that for premium economy. Yowzers. I originally figured I could find a round-trip economy fare for under $1k, or nearly free with miles.
A couple points. An economy fare when? During a shoulder season fare sale, or right now at the peak of summer travel???

Even without oil prices, fares to Europe in the summer have been normally like that the last couple years. Then suddenly in September they trumpted sales! Then prices go up just about as much for Christmas, then in January they trumpet sales again!

The other factor, is of course, expect a couple hundred more per trip with oil at this year's prices than at least year's prices.

I tend to do two or three overseas vacation trips a year, and I find miles the most valuable in the summer (when the cash fares zoom up more than miles do), or to Asian destinations where the miles are a bit more but the cash fares are way more (and if AA doesn't fly directly there so I can neither upgrade to business nor even reserve an exit row seat).

One of the best uses of BA miles is to travel from the U.S./Canada to South America....a route that BA doesn't fly. BA considers Easter Island part of South America, and permits free enroute stopovers in both directions. In other words, for 80k miles, one can fly in J to Chile, Easter Island, and Peru....and there's barely any tax/fuel surcharge at all. LAN has an outstanding business class hard product, and imho, this is an outstanding use of BA FF miles.

As mentioned above, the best use of the BA miles to Europe is to upgrade a BA PE ticket to J....it's only 25K miles for the roundtrip upgrade, and if you keep your ear to the ground for sales, PE can sometimes be quite wonderfully inexpensive. Watch for labor disruption, a strike, a crash, or something that causes lots of bad publicity, and invariably during the next week or two you can find some memorably cheap fares....

is it possible to transfer the Diners miles to someone's else's BA account?

is it possible to transfer the Diners miles to someone's else's BA account?

Unfortunately no. Diners allows for miles to be transferred to other people's frequent flyer accounts for all of their approx 20 airline partners except Frontier, Korean and BA.

PS: Thru the years I've redeemed DC pts for a total over 200K BA miles, all of those BA miles have been redeemed for free 35K mile coach saver tickets on AA between the continental US and Hawaii. My experience has been that if an AA award seat is available on aa.com then it's also available using BA miles.