Originally Posted by
guv1976
I agree that if earning oneworld status is important to him, he should credit to Iberia. But if redemption value is more important to him, then I think AAdvantage is the way to go.
Originally Posted by
allianceflyer9506
absolutely correct and speaking of the status earned on Iberia it would actually work for domestic US Travel since Oro and Platino status on IB is seen as Emerald and Sapphire tier meaning the ability to use Admirals Club and Flagship lounges. My father has done this before on Star Alliance ROP Plus Gold and AA domestic by using his Emerald Status from CX.
IB is certainly a fine recommendation for chasing status, but still not sure how AAdvantage is better than AS Mileage Plan for redemption value in this case, since we have to assume all AA and BA will credit as revenue in AAdvantage.
I just added up the non-AA / BA segments, with cabin bonuses it's 37,000 RDMs & LPs (but some of those are in the 2025 qualification year, we can assume a 40% status bonus on base miles kicks in at some point but would be late in the itinerary). We know that the AA / BA segments won't be more than 20,000 because that's the value of the entire ticket x5, so it might realistically be in the neighborhood of 10,000 RDMs / LPs since just a tad over half of the total flown miles are AA or BA.
If crediting to AS they'd instead be getting 47,000 EQMs on the 2024 portion of the itinerary and ~55,000 RDMs on the 2024 flights, then end up with another 14k EQMs and 25k RDMs on the 2025 flights. In your AA scenario they're just barely squeaking in with AAdvantage Gold (OW Ruby) since the QR flights are after AA's reset (March), with AS they will get MVP Gold and OW Sapphire at 40k. They're getting nearly double the RDMs they'd get with AA. Unfortunately with AS no elite bonus on non-AS flights, where AA does apply it to all OW flights, but I'd rather have OW Sapphire over Ruby any day of the week, especially if the OP is flying economy to Asia frequently.
Normally I'm a big fan of AAdvantage and tend to recommend them a lot, but not on this ticket. Even myself with the 120% EXP bonus (and 11x on revenue) wouldn't buy this ticket with the intention of crediting to AAdvantage.