I had an outstanding agent at the Medallion desk last week (he was in MSP and a former NW employee). I just became Gold as a result of the MR promotion. I had booked two BA J-Class Awards IAD-LHR and NCE-LHR-IAD for August/September (actually the NCE-LHR leg was not “in the bag” yet). As many of you may know, BA’s taxes and fees are astronomical for flights to/from LHR. Ours were over $600 pp.

I decided to see what I could do using SkyMiles. As usual, trying to do this online was not very fruitful. I tried all the “definitive thread” ideas and the best I could come up with was 150,000 miles per person (pp). So I called the Medallion desk to see if they could do better. Is the same desk used for Silvers and Golds? I ask because I know the person mentioned Gold when he picked up the call, though that may just be because he was looking at my status. Anyway, the transatlantic portions on AF were not a problem--which is not all that unusual from IAD--but the NCE-CDG was. Eventually, the agent was able to get us back to CDG via AMS. He really spent a lot of time searching combinations, and he was one of the best agents I’ve ever encountered. So we ended up with IAD-CDG-LHR, NCE-AMS-CDG-IAD (all with reasonable connections) for 100,000 pp. I’m hoping to make Platinum for next year, so later, I’ll see if the direct flights from NCE-CDG become available.