Where are you located? BA Avios are great for domestic travel, but if you're not located in an AA hub (or traveling to an AA hub), their sheen isn't so bright. For example, if you're located in Houston and you want to weekend in New Orleans, with Avios you'd have to go through DFW, which would mean 18k round trip. United would charge 20k round trip for IAH-MSY non-stop. Of course in this particular example, Southwest would dominate, but you get the idea .

There is never a reason to pay a 3.3% transaction fee in order to be able to use a credit card for non-bonus spend. SPG sells points for 3.5 cents each, and you're hardly beating that. SPG also regularly runs sales on points where you can buy them for ~2.5 cents each, and even then there is little interest. Furthermore, consider that domestic 2-star SPG hotels aren't generally expensive, and there are only 4 U.S. category 1 SPG hotels, so you'll be looking mostly at 2-star. For example, Aloft Jacksonville (FL) Tapestry Park is $99/nt for Oct 16-18. Is 3k SPG per night such a deal when you paid $99 to accrue the 3k? (Ok, that first-try example I found just worked too well). So why would you buy for 3.3 cents each? I'm assuming the transaction fee for paying with a check is 0%, so if that's not the case then you can ignore this rant. See Manufactured Spending forum for ideas of how to generate SPG points for MUCH lower cost than 3.3, or even 2.5, cents each. At worst, Plastiq will send a check for you, and they're offering 2% fee for funding by Amex right now.

Perhaps a better program for domestic weekend getaways is IHG. If you stick to the Point Break promo hotels, it's just 5k/night, and the IHG credit card can get you 60k-80k on sign up. Even when you run out of those, you can buy IHG points for 0.7cents each (indirectly, google for details), so 5k/night equates to $35/night.

You don't need to wait for January 50k offers. If they're available in Nov/Dec, that's a great time to jump on them. The 110k points required to earn the companion pass have to be earned in the same calendar year, so if you get the card in November-ish, just wait to hit the minimum spend until the new year (you have 3 months). As long as you hit the $3k required spend in January, the 50k will post in 2016. If you plan this strategically, you could have all 110k post in January, giving you almost 24 full months with companion pass. This puts you up to 3 months ahead of schedule compared to applying for the 50k offers in January, but the bigger advantage is that if the offers are there late this year, better to jump on them and strategically time your spend than to hope they're still around in the new year, as they come and go often. See the Chase forum for more details.