Originally Posted by
veggie_lover
that is an interesting list. Since British Airways flies to Sydney to Singapore , is Sydney considered a Gateway city?also how about London, since there's a flight from London to Singapore.
No.
For starter, for Asia and Australia awards, you must fly Transpac. Therefore London is OUT, eventhough if you go to India, Transatlantic actually is not much more distance as Transpac.
Secondly, you cannot go thru a 3rd region to your destination on an AA or an All Partner award (Exceptions are spelled out clearly on aa.com under award rules.) Only OW award lets you go wherever you want and whichever way you want to fly with the limitations of 1 stopover and 2 connections only thru the same city.
SYD is in a different zone - if you want to include SYD, you have 2 options.
1) redeem 2 awards - one is North America to Asia 2, the other is between Australia and Asia 2.
2) use a OW award - to include SYD in your itinerary, you are looking at a min 20K miles flown, coach award requires 100K miles.
Actually, the J OW award at 130K is an excellent value to visit SYD and bunch of cities in Asia from West Coast when an All Partner J award to South Pacific would cost you 125K. If you can live with the restrictions of OW award, and are willing to pay for a few short segments in the region, the 130K OW J award let you visit a lot more places.
You need Great Circle Mapper to carefully map out your routing as you can easily go over the 20K miles.
From Chicago, you are looking at the next level, which is 25K miles flown, 150K miles required for J award.