Originally Posted by phonehome

I've been mulling over the same dilemma recently (I created a similar thread to this a couple of days ago at the other big frequent flier forum).

My two cents would be to forget about Delta, even with their bonus. (Is that still available?? I thought it expired already.) The only reason to ever pick Delta over BA or CO is if you wanted to go to Australia. In that case Delta would actually be the easiest way to get there. For any other destinations, Delta's award availability is absolutely terrible. I had about 150k skypesos at one point this year and after looking for ways to use them, I ended up just buying AmEx gift cards at ~1 cent/mile. This is how worthless Delta was... I may have just been unlucky with the precise destinations that I was looking at, but my overall impression is that Delta sucks.

Now, CO vs BA is much tougher to call.

The main features of CO are the 1 stopover and 1 open jaw, which I use to travel US-Europe-Asia-US, rough-the-world. I think this type of award is pretty awesome. You get to go to two different continents. Also, CO has very good availability overall and very low fees. Booking oneway awards on CO is generally not a good idea, because stopovers are not allowed.

The main feature of BA is the 50% bonus until the end of July. Using BA to get to Europe is in my opinion too expensive. However, you can fly US-Asia on Cathay via Hong Kong. Cathay flies to most Asian destinations and availability is good. Fees are generally around $150-200 each way. You could also use JAL similarly, though their fees are typically around $300 onewy.
A huge advantage of BA is that you can stop anywhere along the way (though you can only use 1 airline per booking, which usually means you can only stop at that airline's hub). Another big advantage is that you can book roundtrip awards as two stopovers. I recently booked ORD-HKG-TPE on Cathay and TPE-KIX-NRT-ORD on JAL. This cost me 75k for Cathay (1st class) and 50k for JAL (business). Being able to mix classes in this way is itself pretty good. But the overall mileage cost was itself really good. A round trip in business would be 100k, which means 67k MR points. The same trip with CO would've cost you 120k MR points!

You can also use BA miles to get to S. America with LAN. A trip like JFK-Lima-Santiago-Easter Island-Santiago-JFK, with stopovers at every place will cost you 40k BA miles in economy roundtrip, or 27k MR points. Moreover, with LAN you can pay with miles and cash, at a cost of about 1.5 cents per mile. So this is a good way to use leftover BA miles.

__________________________________________________ ______


Long story short, if you really want to fly to Europe and have no other points to use for that purpose, transfer to CO. If you're happy to fly to Asia or S. America, transfer to BA. BA will cost you almost 50% fewer MR points and you'll have to pay about $200-300 more for a roundtrip than with Continental.

If it weren't for the 50% BA bonus I would probably transfer to CO.