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Originally Posted by patersoj
Hello all
Newbie warning, so undoubtedly some stupid questions ahead.
I've been reading the forums for a little while and am hoping to pick your (collective) brains.
I find myself in the position of having acquired myself a bloke living in Washington DC. I'm living just outside London. We've been doing the travelling back and forth thing for a while, and I'm looking for ways to make it
a) more pleasant
b) more sustainable financially for the longer term.
I recently made Bronze (year end Sep 8), and following my next 2 week trip in August will be sitting on 440TP. I realise this is minimal compared to most here, and it is being flown in World Traveller with which I suspect most of you won't be very familiar
Is Silver worth getting? Will it really make life more pleasant?
If so, any suggestions on how best to go about it?
I'll have a few days in DC when bloke is working, so the odd day trip would be possible, but apart from that I only have a couple of days spare leave.
Also, is there a particularly good/bad time to book flights? Or tricks to getting cheaper fares?
I realise these are probably impossibly vague questions, but I'd appreciate any insight, hints & tips which you may be able to share with me.
Many thanks
J
I'm going to offer a different point of view. If your flying is going to be exclusively TATL in Economy, then you will have a much lower out-of-pocket cost on award travel by accumulating points/miles in some program other than BAEC. If you are determined to fly BA for your paid flights, consider crediting the flights to AA. You can then redeem AAdvantage miles for TATL flights
on AA or US metal with no surcharges. As AA/US does not offer LON-WAS on its own metal, you would have to connect somewhere in the U.S. (like JFK, PHL, or CLT) for surcharge-free award travel.
Or just fly UA LHR-IAD and credit the flights to UA (or to ANA, if the UA flights are in a fare bucket that earns 100% credit in ANA's program). ANA's program is distance based, so it only costs 43,000 ANA miles for LHR-IAD-LHR (or LHR-EWR-IAD-EWR-LHR) on UA metal, with no surcharges.