Newbie, 315 needed by June
Hope everyone is well! New to the forum but have been trying to do as much reading as I can to catch-up, so apologies if I’ve missed something simple here.
Year resets: 8 June
Current tier points: 255
Upcoming flights: 3 sectors GLA-LCY/LCY-GLA/GLA-LCY, expecting another 30 from these.
Currently have bronze and am not doing much more flying this year so aiming for silver, therefore needed by 5 June: 315 needed
Background information: Live with good access to all 3 LON airports. I have free accommodation with friends in both Dublin, and near Almeria. I need to take at least a week A/L in April or in May and am flexible with dates. A friend of mine is going to be in Palma for the 3rd week of April, and it could be nice to tie a visit in, but I would have to pay for accommodation there.
Ideas I’ve had so far
·I’ve seen that there are good returns in CE from EDI to PMI, routing LHR and MAD, coming in around the £400 mark. Am I right in saying that this would be 40+40+20 TPs each way, so 200 return, coupled with 80TPs for positioning to and from Scotland (and a fare coming in at around £200?). Would this be a reasonable price?
·As I have free accommodation in Spain I was also trying to look at returns to LEI, from LHR I could find prices around the £350 mark. Whilst I would need to do another trip somewhere for extra TPs lost out on positioning to EDI I wouldn’t be paying for accommodation. Do Air Nostrum and Iberia Express both credit TPs the same as flights to PMI would, as I see the MAD-LEI sector is on (but with an IB codeshare).
·If one of the two Spanish options are good value for money, is there an easier way to use ITA matrix in “calendar” mode when doing an open-jaw search, say EDI-LHR-MAD-LEI for the outbound and PMI-MAD-LHR-EDI for the return. I’d be most interested in this but am struggling to find ways to search it.
·Is there an easy way to force ITA Matrix to use specific IB flights, so that I can try and target the widebody? Everytime I seem to find the right flights in the time bars, if I click on the fare, when it goes to the summary at the end it seems to show different flights to what I chose.
·Am I right in saying that if I were looking to try and take advantage of a BA Holiday, I would need to have “BA” flight numbers on all flights, not IB? But can it be on an IB ticket or does it need to be on a BA ticket? Apologies if this doesn’t even make sense, again trying to play with ITA to only show eligible ones. I’m just conscious that the TP bonus of a holiday would cut out the need and cost of positioning to and from EDI for the extra 80TP.
If there are any other obvious options or ideas I’ve missed, I’m open to new ideas! At the moment I’m actually just trying to balance up whether it is even worth the push for silver for me as I’m not sure of how much flying I’ll be doing next year, so just trying to weigh up my options. Especially with how the tier point years are changing which I haven’t quite figured out yet. I've also considered POUG some of the flights which I'm doing anyway for work, but it just feels like bad value on such a short domestic hop.
Many thanks for any help