Mountain Trader

I'm still running the numbers but my early take goes like this:

Even with the 100,000 points, there's not much here if you want to fly TATL in economy. Get one card and spend $2,000 and you'll get 2 free tickets TATL. Those "free" flights will each cost you about $400 in fees, plus $37 of annual fees on the card (if they don't waive it) allocated to the 2 flights. The cost of purchased flights vary by routing and time of year but you can usually get to London from the US for $550-700, so the savings aren't much. Add in BA's shoddy treatment of non-status economy customers (eg. lack of advance seat assignments), and I'm using my CC spending elsewhere.

Clearly Business Class is another story. Those 100,000 miles will get you TATL in C for $75 in annual fees and about $500 in fees and taxes. That's a deal.

I'm still chewing over the 30K spend for a free companion ticket. Again, I think economy is a waste, so I'm looking hard at C. 30K of spending gets me a 10k bonus on SPG, which amounts to a 50K transfer to most of the airlines Starwood covers (plus a bump in statis on Starwood itself). I need to look further to see if I want to marry BA and Chase this much.