Hi Everyone,

Long time lurker, first time poster. Was hoping to get some advice from the enlightened folks on this forum.

So I'm trying to redeem some miles to get a business class ticket on Cathay from JFK-HKG. Sounds simple enough, problem is I'm a Star Alliance guy, plenty of miles on United but nothing significant in OW.

I've got a lot of Amex membership rewards, Starpoints and Marriott reward points. So I'm trying to figure out my options:

1) Transfer points from AMEX MR to Iberia Plus and use it to book a ticket. This will cost me 154K MR points. Seems high.

2) Amex MR transfer to Aeroplan at 1:1 and then Aeroplan to AAdvantage through Points.com: I think the transfer fees from Aeroplan would bite me although in terms of points, it's 110K on AA assuming I can transfer from Aeroplan to AAdvantage at 1:1

3) BA: I have 20K odd miles in BA. Convert 125K marriott reward points into 50K BA miles + convert 25K starpoints into 25K BA miles (and starwood throws in 5K miles). In terms of miles BA only requires 100K to redeem on OW partners but it's a lot of hotel points to be using and I'm not sure if this is the most effective use of them.

Any ideas on what the best use of my points/miles is to redeem this? Should I be conserving points and focus on maybe buying some miles from the airline (in option 3 for example)?

Any ideas would be appreciated. Thanks.