Hi Leonidasc,
I just finished my first DONE3 trip. 20k nTP in 19 days
Interesting. I've never thought abou it. I'm not sure but based on my understanding to BA's new rule, TPs on partner flights (not AA/IB) should always be calculated using miles. On their website they say spend based TP are
awarded on "any commercial British Airways, American Airlines and Iberia marketed flights". If your flight don't have a BA/AA/IB flight number it's not a BA/AA/IB marketed flight.
Adding more legs to your plan won't increase the final price too much. Only taxes and YQ (as long as you stay DONE3). I believe YQ is priced and charged by your ticketing airline and it may be different across airlines. See
#804. As for taxes just aviod places with high air travel taxes like the UK.
QR, JL and AY offers more TPs. If you want to take as less flights as possible you can consider these long routes: DOH-LAX on QR, HEL-LAX on AY, and HND-JFK on JL; then make your route twisty within a TC. For example if you travel from east to west, you can land on west coast (DOH-LAX), take a transcon flight to the east coast, then departure to Tokyo (JFK-HND). AS offers more TPs than AA on transcon flights.
I've built a handy online D/AONEx nTP calculator, initially for myself, but now I've made it public:
https://xonex.pages.dev. It works on any D/AONEx routes with BA/AY/IB progam (it uses exact airport coordinates - results are not accurate if compared to the offical calculator! Expect small errors ±20 TP per seg). Hope that helps
