My husband and I will be taking a cruise from Singapore to Hong Kong and extending up to visit friends in Shanghai afterwards. We would like to use our AA miles for business class flights if possible (although we don't have a ton of miles). Originally, I was looking at taking a multi city trip starting on the East Coast (PHL, EWR, BWI) to SIN, then HKG to PVG and finally PVG back to departing East coast city (essentially 3 flights). But I'm wondering with wanting to use frequent flyer points am I better off doing a round trip to say HKG and then purchasing the short flights HKG to SIN and then roundtrip HKG to PVG?

Really looking for the best value points/cash for the whole flight portion of our trip. And what airlines do you recommend from the East Coast to Asia?

Thanks in advance for your thoughts/advice.

Liz