Ok - Sorry to sound like a broken record, but dates now fixed!

Turns out I'll actually be making two trips to Australia - 30 May - 12 Jun and 14 Jul - 5 Aug. I usually fly to Brisbane with BA/QF, so flying to Syd is a few hours out of the way. Were it only one trip, I'd book BA WTP for the chance to give it a go and see what difference it makes. But now I'm looking at two, I want to make sure I don't end up splitting miles between accounts. So....

Which would you go for:

2 Returns LON-SYD in WT+ with domestic flights to BNE @ approx £2437.00
2 Returns LON-BNE on SQ Y @ approx £1702

These are what I see as pros and cons of each:

BA WT+
+ Comfier Seating
+ Chance to actually get some work done - 6 hours on a laptop could cover a fair bit of the price difference!
+ 12000 extra miles
- Looking at an extra 3 hours travel each way
- 2 Overnight flights on outward trips

SQ Y
+ Better flight times - I can manage a single overnight outbound, with a nice evening arrival, making jetlag easier (I usually arrive in BNE on the 6.30 am qantas, which is a killer )
+ Cheaper!
- It's Y, but from what I've heard, an improvement on most...?

Also, from the status point of view, if I fly with SQ this will get me *silver and most of the way to gold, or VS silver - both pretty useless I know! HOWEVER with BA, I'd be only 40 tierpoints off silver (one of the runs is ex-Ams), which I could gain from booking one of the QF sectors in business. Now that does sound like a pretty useful card to have - just on my UK-AUS flights I'd be using 6 lounges on each return alone, making transit more pleasant!

As I have previously only flown discount economy which earns .25 on BA, I'm really starting from scratch here - 30,000 odd miles on a QF account and 20,000 in VS, but nothing more than that, so a good time to start afresh!

As far as using the status goes, my yearly travel pattern is something like UK-AUS * 1 or 2, UK-US * 1 or 2 and a few european and domestic flights. My choice of programme here would probably effect who all these flights are booked with - go with BA and I'd use WTP where not over-priced (MFUs are appealing!), go with SQ and I'd use SQ for AUS, BMI for europe/uk and UA (access to E+ seating) for US.

Sorry for such a long post! Everyone here has been so helpful though, so I'd be really glad to know your thoughts!

Best wishes,

Dan

PS Another thing I just thought of - reports here suggest that upgrades chances from WT+ are fairly high - that could help swing it, as virtually no chance on SQ.