Originally Posted by
Catch23
Assuming you are based in LA, then BA miles costs (flying on BA) are expensive as they route you through London.... you go the long way round the world, but you get a free stopover in London. Routings out of london to SE Asia for BA are very hard to find - its a popular route for the brits....
This is also why the fees are so high... leaving london to fly long distance costs about $200 in Govt taxes... then theres BA fuel fees.....
Yes I want to avoid using BA miles on BA to avoid the surcharges. When you do your search it will ask if you want a stopover (always offering London). If you choose no stopover, it will of course say there's no BA availability for that route and suggest that you include partners in your search. Including partners will generally then find you some availability to most places (and help you avoid BA surcharges), but I haven't had any luck with SE Asia. I can't figure out how BA determines award availability. I was looking at booking a partner award to the Caribbean through BA recently. The partner was AA. On AA's site award availability showed EVERY day on the calender, for months. BA allowed awards only on a few sporadic days to and from, making it awkard to put together a RT that wasn't either very short, or very long.
Originally Posted by
saad
if you go to places like malaysia or indonesia then you can make great use of your spg points since there are some pretty good cat 1 properties there....
This is exactly my intention! 83k goes quite far at 2k per night! Then maybe in the more expensive areas like BKK, Bali, or SIN I'll do a 5th night free award in a cat 3 or 4, coupled with a 25% off through the "rewarding returns" promo if I can earn one by then.