I thought I’d share my experience booking my 4th Oneworld Classic flight itinerary this week. We have a son in London and a daughter in New York, thus we travel a lot. We sometimes do a paid RTW in between to rack up points and status and this year thanks to our recent RTW booked through AA, I’ve attained Platinum with Qantas and my husband has Platinum Pro with AA. Given that Qantas is devaluing their points after 5 August this year I thought we’d squeeze one more business class OWA trip in while I have access to the premium call centre. I spent two full days planning route after route, trying to find enough business class award flights to get us to the places we wanted to go. This is the itinerary I ended up with.

SYD-LAX (XO) -PDX- (XO) LAX-HND (XO) -BKK (XO) -HEL-LHR (XO)-PER-SYD

34,612 miles

Upon request Qantas released 2 x business class seats SYD-LAX (a month in US with family) then the Portland leg for a couple of weeks in Canada. Transiting back through LAX to a short stopover in Tokyo, then down to BKK when we will take separate positioning flights back to Sydney to spend Christmas before flying back to BKK in April to resume the OWA itinerary and transit HEL to London (Europe) to spend 3 months before coming back home.

I have booked dummy dates for the BKK-HEL-LHR-PER-SYD and plan to change those dates as soon as the flights become available for April/May and before my Platinum status runs out (in October this year). I hope to again request the release of 2 x QF business seats for the LHR-PER-SYD (alt. LHR-SIN-SYD). The other Finnair flights seem to have reasonable availability if I get in quickly.

I have to say that with Platinum status the entire booking process is a completely different ball game. Hitherto I have had no status and even with all the flight availability checked in advance, every single time was an exercise in anger management and frustration. Having access to the premium team – people who actually know what they are doing and are happy to actually do it for you! It was, believe it or not, a pleasant experience! The whole itinerary took just under 2 hours to book and ticket!

But my real problem here is that the LAX-HND on AA has only econ availability. Does anyone have any suggestions as to how I could find business award availability on this leg? I have put flight alerts into EF for several AA flights on and around the required date and it shows JAL flights but not award availability. Worst case scenario, could we request a points upgrade closer to the time using my husband’s account as Plat Pro? Can that be done if it’s a qantas booked OWA itinerary?

Hoping to get some more experienced minds to give me some advice?