Hi All,

I'd posted earlier in the AA forum about taking a RTW trip using their distance based award chart (such a good value!), but with a toddler, and the difficulty of pulling together that much vacation time, it probably won't happen. So here is my new question.

1. We'd like to go to South America. We have family in Bolivia, a few hours outside of La Paz, but that may not be the best place to cart around a 1-2 yr old. So we are thinking of visiting somewhere else in South America (Santiago and Buenos Aires are top choices) and having our family meet us there. We could possibly do two cities but probably not more than that. I also know that Northern South America is cheaper than Southern South America, so that is a consideration (e.g., maybe fly to Lima on miles and buy a ticket to a point south).

2. We'd like to go to Italy. The plan would be to spend a little time at Lake Como (so, flying into MXP) driving down and departing from FCO.

Here are our constraints:

--For both trips we'd like to travel in at least business class.

--We can pretty easily do a trip of about one business week (9 calendar days) or a little more on each trip.

--If there are some interesting tricks or ways to make the most of routing rules we're willing to tack on another city/country to the trip. (We might even be willing to do something like Caribbean + South America rather than Santiago/Buenos Aires, for example)

--We will be flying with a toddler. Although we could carry her as a lap infant, it would probably be easier to buy a ticket.

--Between the two of us, my wife and I have about 200k UA miles, 250k DL miles, 300k AA miles, 40k US miles, 100k Chase UR points, and 200k Amex MR points. So I think we have some options.

My question:

How can we optimize our use of miles on this trip? My current thinking is to use AA miles to South America and DL miles to Italy. I would really prefer to fly in J but I see that AA offers off peak awards to South America in Y which are tempting because they'd be so much cheaper.

As far as I can tell each of these trips will cost me 100k a person in J or 50-60k a person in Y (with the exception of the AA off peak to South America). Is there any way around this? Any clever tricks I'm missing? I know I can get a free stopover at the North American gateway with AA. Is there a way I can exploit this? Maybe use that stopover to set up the second trip somehow?

Thanks in advance!