Originally Posted by
deltame
+1 If you are on a limited (miles) budget and want to see the world, save the miles of flying in comfort (business class) for trips to Asia (and similar farther away places). Flying from NYC to Europe is very doable in coach, and you can also consider mixing it up (one way in coach and another in business). Also invest sometime to study the airline mileage redemption rules to take advantage of free stopover and open jaw, and potentially combine multiple destinations in one trip.
Yep. Especially because the OP is in New York, he can take advantage of AA's stopover rule to create the first half of a domestic RT. Although
this thread talks about using the stopover on the outward bound portion of a flight from SFO, the principles are the same if JFK is the originating airport.
Just as a quick example. If you did JFK-LHR (ignoring for the moment the potential for huge fuel surcharges if your flight ends up on BA metal) on a MileSAAver award during the offseason, you could structure LHR-JFK-SFO on the way back. The award cost for JFK-LHR-JFK-SFO would be the same as for JFK-LHR-JFK, 40K miles. You have a year to complete travel on the JFK-SFO leg left from your "stopover," so you could possibly book a MileSAAver SFO-JFK award to complete the second trip at 12.5K.
In other words, you could potentially spend 110K on AAnytime economy awards for JFK-LHR-JFK and JFK-SFO-JFK--or 52.5K as set forth above.
If you have limited means to gather miles, make your goals realistic and learn how to use the rules to stretch the value of your miles. Trying to do a business class award with limited means is like a hungry, unemployed man taking his last $500 for dinner at Per Se. Might be a delicious dinner, but it's almost certainly not a wise use of $500 for him.