Originally Posted by
Grand_Tour_18
I’d appreciate some guidance and advice from someone with more experience with award travel than me.
I’ve booked a cruise for June-July 2027 that sails from and returns to Dover, England so I want round-trip Business Class trans-Atlantic tickets for myself and my wife from the U.S. to LHR or LGW. My nearest airport to my home is CVG. I’m looking for ways to maximize the value of my various miles and points, realizing that I may not have enough to cover the entire trip with points. I also realize that I may have to book positioning flights to/from my gateway cities.
I have Aeroplan (114K); Delta (100K); AmEx (170K) and Chase UR (25K).
I’m stuck on figuring out how to eat this elephant. What’s a good approach?
As Mwenenzi mentioned, your balance is quite low for two business class award tickets.
looking at your account balances, I think one option you could explore is Air Canada. Log into your AC account and see what kind of points you need for your routing this summer to get an idea of points needed,
AC +AMEX MR transfer will give you 284K points. Looking at AC award charts, thats should be good for at least 1 business class seat with some left over points. You can look at purchasing more points (AC seems to have point sales every so often) or use CC bonus to collect more miles. Or just buy the other ticket on cash.
Another option worth exploring is purchasing economy or premium economy tickets and upgrading via points. Dont know about AC specifically but there is a Star Alliance points based upgrade option that you might be able to utilize (there are some rules around carriers, flight numbers and always space dependent so not guaranteed…)