Originally Posted by
javabytes
There is no right answer. Award prices fluctuate day to day, week to week, and don’t follow a consistent pattern.
Saver business class awards across the pond are 115k round trip. While it’s possible you may find web specials lower, this is unlikely for premium cabin travel especially in this era of quickly rebounding demand. Airlines have little reason to believe they’ll have excess capacity to give away for cheap miles.
As Mr. BoH noted, given changes and reinstatements are free, lock in something you’d be happy with and then monitor for changes. I’d think you should be able to improve upon 87k for a main cabin round trip. Set ExpertFlyer alerts, if they find saver inventory you should be able to reticket at 60k or less.
If you're willing to spend the 115k miles rt for business and you are ok with a connection, you should be able to get there on Finnair. The AA search won't offer it if you search through to FCO, but search as far as HEL, put it on hold, and an agent can add the HEL-FCO leg. Some of the connections can be a little harsh; it's up to you if it's worth it (I had a 6 hr connection on ORD-HEL-FCO, which is basically a waste of a day -- I would probably do it differently next time, particularly if I can be a bit more flexible with dates, giving me my choice of gateways)
That would also work for saver economy, of course.