Originally Posted by Dave Noble
The ATW ticket you are buying does sound like it is a World Discovery Plus ticket; ... KxDIS2 fare. ... each trip [to Australia] will give about 50% of the annual renewal requirements.
with either AA or QF
Originally Posted by Dave Noble
...if you end up with a long routing, you can make changes without penalty as they become available. ( e.g. sister travelling CNS-SYD was booked as CNS-TSV-BNE-SYD however as it became available was able to change to CNS-SYD.
I assume this means no charges for any changes with AA award; as I recall, QF charged 5000 points for one change, but it may have been a change to a shorter route. QF often maintain changes cannot be made after the trip begins when other carriers are involved (such as AA), but on one instance when I called AA about this, the story I was given by AA was that they were willing to accommodate the change if QANTAS were to change the award booking; in their view I gathered it was QF not wanting to do it.
Originally Posted by Dave Noble
If my understanding of the ticket you buy is correct, then you would have little difficulty renewing platinum
Recently, I have been making about three trips to Australia every two years, and each year have some flights in NA, and in Australia. So when there are two Oz trips in a year, renewing on QF is has been less of an issue when in K class, and you have shown that on AA it would not be an issue. But any year I only make one trip, the NA flying is insufficient to make up the difference (for example, 13 flights@~500min each last year is not many miles, perhaps 13% of miles needed to renew AA Platinum), but was 135 status credits (over 20% of needed amount for QF Gold). When I have a light year in flying, QF have renewed Gold each time, yet I understand that AA would not do that.
Originally Posted by Dave Noble
If you had to do it as 2 awards it would have come to 110k-125k in economy depending on time of year.
I gather that AA has a mileage or segment or stop limitation on AA awards? or why would it be two awards?
Originally Posted by Dave Noble
AA does also allow travel on TN which , I believe, tends to be fairly reasonable for availability and would provide an option to keep the trip in the 75k price.
TN would be on my list to fly someday, so this could be attractive.
Originally Posted by Dave Noble
Just looking for availability at start of next July, I found Z (first class) availability on SFO-SYD service on 08 july which would give a decent option for a 145k first award
But generally we do not know for certain that we are going until March, or possibly January at the earliest. Perhaps having the SFO option now may increase trans-Pacific award availability.