Hi All,

I hope this is not seen as either obvious or inappropriate; however, I am in need of guidance. I am quite large at 6’7 325 lbs. I am not obese or even fat (and I am not judging those who are). I am just a large mesomorph. My problem is that I hope to fly from Tampa to Prague and then from Prague to San Francisco. I am starting a PhD program, but would like to spend some time in Europe before the onslaught of education begins. While I am not really a frequent flyer, when I do fly, I am usually put in first-class because of the discomfort that my size causes those sitting in my row. However, this does not always happen and when it does not, the arms of the chair dig into my legs and I, as well as those in my row, need to continuously compress the width of our bodies to fit in he space allotted. Usually I fly from Tampa to Newark (NJ) so it is only a couple of hours and if I am not upgraded, we just deal with the discomfort for the short flight. I am would not be capable maintaining this level of discomfort for such a long flight. I would also feel horrible for putting who ever sit near me, through this torment. I realize that they paid good money for their seats.

So why not just buy First Class? It costs too much. I cannot afford it. So I noticed that AA has a business class for both “legs” of the trip for 100,000 points. So I started looking around and noticed two things, it’s not that easy to find points for sale and that one guy has been selling the same 202200 AA miles for about a year now (I don’t trust him).

So, what is it I am hoping to accomplish? I would like to find reasonably priced (if not cheap) miles, 100,000 of them. I have looked online, but most websites that say they sell them are no longer running. I did see that I could buy 40,000 from AA directly but that still leaves me 60,000 short. I looked through this forum but did not find a thread that offers this.

Also, there were some people online who claimed that AA points are more difficult to redeem then other company points. So I checked the number of points that Delta required for the same trip and they wanted 400,000 (yikes). Continental was 100,000.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

Thank You!

Al