Originally Posted by
FWAAA
Welcome to Flyertalk.
There's a third choice. I'm thoroughly confused - why wouldn't you simply book the flight on aa.com where the AS flights from SEA (and the CX flights) show up all as AA codeshares, giving you full AA miles?
Because AA feels that their name on the codeshare is worth an additional 2000 for business class tickets. I normally pay 6200 to cathay vs 8000+ for the same flight on American. Its also a longer flight because of the way American routes it.
My next trip: 8/4-8/18
American: 9700 It is sea-lax-nrt-hkg. at that point it is less and faster to take delta sea-nrt-hkg. The shorter route fare is over 10K
Cathay: 6650
The other alternative is to switch to banking my miles at Alaska (since I live in Seattle). The drawback is that the bonus for business class is I think only 25% vs 50% on others.
I am thinking it might make sense to do the Delta challenge since the fare on Delta is often much better than cathay -- the times are lousier though since it gets me to HKG too late to get to mainland china by boat. And on the return leaves too early so I have to go to HKG the day before as well.