Originally Posted by
cheltzel
I don't know how many miles you have or how much you are willing to spend. But from my personal experience booking business class awards to the Middle East (and I am including Israel in that aggregation), getting saver awards on AA will be problematical. I have found that your best bets for saver business awards are (in no particular order) RJ, IB and EY. Any of these will be 70K miles each way per person. So you are looking at 140K miles per round trip.
While you can book on BA, the fees are very high (somewhere around $1000 per person round trip). I just finished booking and ORD-TLV, AMM-ORD award trip on RJ and it was 140K miles and around $70 per person. I was hoping to fly EY but I just couldn't get the flights for the days I needed. The mileage charge and fees would have been very similar (same miles but a bit higher fees).
With EY, would that have been using AA miles? I have loads of AA miles, but wouldn't want to spend over the 140k mark. How did you search for EY availability?
RJ does seem to be the "best" option with AA, I agree--BA's fees price me out of willingness to go that route. I was hoping that AA would have availability on their own DFW-TLV routing, but haven't seen a single saaver fare since that route became available to book...