Darren covered your questions quite thoroughly. Your routing is fine however does have some dangers in terms of vulnerability to schedule change or seat availability if you are doing this over an extended period of time and/or need to change dates. Most of your long-haul A flights are *very hard* to get, for example LHR-CPT is sometimes sold out for weeks in F never mind A! It all depends on the season (LHR-JNB is much easier to get though and is a viable alternative; however this only affects your difficulty in getting the initial booking as presumably you won't be changing the date of this flight). JNB-SYD currently offers F but in the past has not; in any case it has sub-standard QF service compared to the LAX and LHR flights. Still nice, and the seats are the same, but rather a shame that it isn't QF at its best. SYD-SCL has only 5 seats in the F cabin and operates 4 times a week, so you are competing for 20 seats per week. One conference or board meeting and they are all gone. With no alternatives except the much poorer J service on this flight. EZE-JFK is operated by AA (2 class 763) so it does not have F. And JFK-LHR is a 6 hour flight making it impossible to sleep trans-Atlantic. None of these issues are important enough to change your plans but you need to be aware of these considerations and factor them in when making routing decisions or deciding between A/D. If you want complete flexibility in dates you have to choose routes with frequent service. My own choice would be to buy AONE6 and go SYD-HKG-YVR-...-SCL-LAX-LHR... (you are allowed a 2nd NA transit from SA to Europe; but then the SA part has to be after the NA segments). You can also fly BA EZE-LHR or LAN SCL-FRA via MAD.