Originally Posted by
wakesetter93
Doing some planning for my upcoming honeymoon (May 2022) and trying to figure out the best use for my MR points. FIance wants to go somewhere with an overwater villa so I'm looking at using 140k AA miles to go DFW-DOH-MLE in Q Suites. Have 150k (and counting) MR points and looking for the best options to use them. Would like to spend a week or so in Europe after MLE before flying back to the states.
I had also tossed around the idea of burning the 140k AA miles on JL or CX to get to Thailand and book a paid ticket in J to Europe as prices are fairly inexpensive right now before flying back to DFW.
Any advice is appeciated as this will be my first large redemption for longhaul J and I'm sure I'm missing something!
Where do you really want to go? Thailand, Maldives, Europe, around the world?
MLE plus Europe makes sense geographically, Thailand and Europe together, why? Because you can or because you want it?
May is not a good weather month in the Maldives. Nor in French Polynesia. Do you want to go in rainy season?
To MLE from DFW, Qatar is the way to go if available.
Right now there are transfer bonuses on MR, figure out who has availablity (once you know where you want to go). I'd check IB for the TATL portion, they have lower fees than BA. If there is a Star Alliance Routing, and you can use Air Canada, there may be a stopover option for 5k additional; One World (and I think Sky Team) don't have free stopovers (although I'd be happy to be corrected). AA, BA, IB don't have free stopovers. BA has the best availability and the worst fees. IB has better availability using Avios than AA has access to using AA miles and the current MR transfer bonus is 40%. Seats on IB J not quite as good as AA J (and definitely not as good as Q suites), but lie flat and decent.
Get a trial free version of Expertflyer - or just subscribe. For something like this, there is no substitute other than paying for the booking service from Gary (View From the Wing) or Ben (One Mile At a Time).