Originally Posted by
BigMouthStrikesAgain
Hi,
My parents have roughly 200k AA miles each. One has 80k United Miles, the other has 12k United.
They live in south Florida (FLL, MIA). They are travelling into Kilamanjaro (JRO) in June and departing Livingston (LVI) in July. They are also trying to visit a friend in London on one side of this trip.
I am trying to work a nice comfortable business class trip out for them, without depleting all of their miles AND all of their cash. The best itinerary I found for 1 portion of the trip was 75,000 miles plus $650 pp. I tried calling AA to see if there were options for MIA-DOH-JRO but they showed no avail. I checked the BA Avios site to look for Qatar availabilty but I couldn't find JRO either.
For you AAa members, any creative ideas? Any way to reduce BA's high surcharges? Or alternate/hidden city ideas?
Thank you in advance!
QR is for sure the way to go if you can find availability. QR generally doesn't release any business award seats on the US-DOH routes on Fridays or Saturdays, with Thurs & Sun being hit or miss depending on the city. Mon/Tues/Wed will have much more space.
Using your BA account, search all of QR's US gateways to DOH, not just MIA. Think ATL, IAH, DFW, ORD, IAD, etc. Find space on the long segment, then search the DOH-JRO flight separately. From most gateways it looks like this will require an overnight in DOH, make sure you keep the dates straight.
If you find flights that line up on BA, call AA and give the AAgent the flights segment by segment. You can then have them search for the flight from MIA to the gateway on AA, which they can include in the same award.