Yea after some thinking after the initial shock of the DEQM, im starting to lean in the direction of not doing it.

The RDM sounds nice, but I'm also in the middle of another credit card churn so I can have at least another 100k miles in the next year anyway. I'm going to get my wife to do the same so RDM isn't a high priority, even though it sounds nice. For me, international award availability was an issue, not the miles themselves. I had about 300k miles sitting in my account since I didn't have anywhere to use them for. There was no availability for New Zealand and I hadn't thought about using then for JNB. However, BA fuel surcharges pretty much killed that idea (only flight is through LHR). The locations i want to use them for would be Austalia and New Zealand.

The flight from LHR-JNB would be longer than the one to LHR so going to LHR would be a warm up compared to the 12 hours to JNB. It is much shorter than the direct 16hr JFK-JNB flight and at least we will have lounge access to relax in between flights.