I am thinking about trying to get Silver quickly at the start of my next tier point collection year. My collection year ends on 8 May. I have been looking at the AUH-CMB-CGK run on UL and with the current Avios offer from BA positioning to AUH is fairly cheap in WT, but the flight times are incredibly awkward and I am trying to avoid needing to take much time off work. So far I have been able to come up with this combination of nested tickets.
Thanks to the Avios offer I can get the total cost of this to something like £716 and I believe the total trip returns 600TPs, which I don't think is bad value and means I only need two eligible BA/IB flights to secure Silver. It doesn't seem to be possible with the flight timings to do this routing any quicker – unless I am wrong?
The main issue with trying to do it this fast is that it leaves only 3 /12 hours between arriving in AUH on the UL inbound and taking the BA flight back to LHR. It looks like both carriers operate out of AUH Terminal 1, but I am extremely nervous about booking a connection like this on separate tickets. The only time I have tried something similar with a CA domestic flight CGO-PEK and a BA flight PEK-LHR, and I missed the BA flight due to late baggage on the inbound (I won't have baggage this time, but still).
Am I worrying too much about booking this itinerary with a tight separate-ticket connection? I am wondering if Amex Plat missed connection cover would consider 3 1/2 hours in this situation sufficient time to make a claim should the UL inbound be late.
I've booked this end of April start of May, and the connecting BA flights were not very good at all. So in the end I booked Etihad from LHR to AUH - no points, but ment that it was just a couple of hours between connecting flights, so quicker and saved having to have a hotel stopover. As you need the four BA/IB flights as well though may not be good for you, but would have thought been easy enough to get 4 qualifuing flights maybe LGW-JER-LGW-AMS-LGW would do it.