Originally Posted by
etch5895
Kiwi: I noticed that on the SCL-PUQ flights it is in economy, but for the relatively short flights, so be it. Hopefully I still get the miles as booked in business. For the intra-Asia flights, what is the business class product like? Is it similar to intra-European business class?
The SCL-PUQ flights will only earn according to the cabin you fly in. So in this case it will be discounted economy class even if you are on a first class ticket. So I would definitely buy them separately and not waste precious segments on them.
May I suggest something else? Start from AMM and spend the money saved to do a DONE5 for EUR 5700. Then you could do something like:
amm-hkg-mnl-nrt-del-nrt-syd-hnl-dfw-anc-dfw-jfk-scl-ipc-scl-fra-amm
This is 55125 miles.
In terms of crediting this to a program, you might want to consider QF as well. This itinerary would give you 1940 SCs, so enough to make QF Platinum (=OW Emerald). 7 of those and you will have lifetime Gold on Qantas. QF has a bad earn/burn ration compared to AA but the advantage is the easy lifetime status plus the lounge access for domestic segments in North America which AA will not give you. But QF is also enforcing the 4 segment rule. You will have SYD-HNL on QF and HNL-DFW can be booked as a QF code share. So yo would only need to do 2 small $79 flights from SYD to get to the 4 segments.