Tredders

Hi all

I need to organise a business trip from LHR - ORD within the next month (4 or 5 days duration). Dates are flexible, and company travel rules dictate Premium Economy. My default for this kind of trip would be to book BA, and either try to UUA at the time of booking, or set an alert on reward flight finder to find a potential upgrade before the flight. I also hold out the (possibly misguided?) idea that I've got a decent chance of getting an OPUP if my flight is busy, which happened recently on a trip to MIA. At the moment, going down this route would cost just under £1000.

Having said that... my tier points collection year ends in Nov, and I'll retain Gold in a couple weeks after a trip to HEL, so I don't particularly need the TPs, so I'm open to other suggestions. I keep seeing people on here discussing fantastic business class flights ex-EU, but I wouldn't know how to start looking for those (I looked on Google flights but it wasn't obvious to me how to find these deals).

So my question to the good folk on here is what would you do? I don't mind adding a few £££ if I could grab a well-priced business class flight, and I don't mind a connecting flight as long as it doesn't add hours and hours to the trip. Is AA PE significantly better than BA? I love flying on a BA 747 if I can get on the upper deck, but don't know what the PE offering on that plane is like... Are there any bargains to be had with (gasp!) non-OneWorld carriers?

Thanks as ever in advance for any help with this.