My first real Trip Report, another one off the back of the fantastic IB deal at the end of last year.
Originally we had BA Club World seats booked using an Amex BA 241 to LA on the A380 at the end of April, and we were very much looking forward to it. I’d banked enough TPs to keep my Executive Club Silver for another year so was worth just doing a straight redemption. I like to maintain Silver level for the bonus Avios and lounge access as I have family in Spain that I visit a few times a year.
But when this deal came along I started looking towards the next level – GOLD! The Gold benefits are good, but the standout feature for me would be the soft landing back to silver the year after – This meant I could do nearly 2 years just doing redemptions without having to worry about keeping Silver status up.
Our original plan was to take AA Y flights between LAX and SFO/LAS while there, but now I was looking at a TP run I needed to calculate a trip with AA YUP fares and even a bit of BA CE POUG. Before the trip I was on 680 TP exactly. Silver in the bag for another year. Now to get another 820!
There were many options open to us to bag the points needed, but my wife decided straight away we weren’t going to go on any sloped AA seats. This cut our routing options. I started to use the useless IB booking engine, they didn’t make it easy.
As we were more than likely going via New York, my wife wanted a stopover. I couldn’t get anything reasonable in the fare rules, just an overnight. I also included an open jaw SFO/LAX. Eventually after 2 days of constant messing I managed to get a itinerary ticketed through ebookers.fr.
29/3 ORY-JFK OpenSkies BA8005 Bizbed
30/3 JFK-SFO AA59 in J
10/4 LAX-SFO AA172 in J
10/4 JFK-ORY BA8006 Bizbed
This was a good for my wife, flatbeds all round. Both AA legs I managed to get booked on the A321T. These are 3 class, but I couldn’t get booked into F so it was 4 legs of 140 TPs.
So, that got us to 1240 TPs – only 260 to go. I saw 'I class' availability on the LHR-ORY flights to connect to/from OpenSkies so chanced my arm, booked cheapy hand baggage only fares and immediately got an offer to upgrade to Club Europe so we would receive 80 TPs. That left 180 to find, just a tantilizing 3 AA F segments away from Gold.
I have a thing about Sixt car rental, they’re always good to me and have some smashing upgrades over the years so when I saw they had opened a branch in LAS I immediately went to check their offers. I was able to book a BMW 6-series convertible from them for a frankly ludicrous pay on arrival rate $670 including insurances for 8 days. My feeling was to get this car in Vegas and drive to LA and back as it would be a great car to run around LA in. Therefore I did my AA routings as such..
Arrive in SFO on AA from JFK, spend 2 nights there then take SFO-LAX-LAS in AA F. Pick up car, 2 nights in Vegas then drive to LA. Drive back to Vegas 9/4 fly AA LAS-LAX, return to the LA hotel then take the 10:20 AA172 back in the morning.
Sounds complicated? Not yet...
I'm going to try and do this in 5 parts including this one. There are plenty of pics.