Originally Posted by jrobin
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.
With a normal award, changes can be made free of charge as long as the starting point,end point and carrier remains the same . So if booked, for example, on Qantas from LHR-SIN-PER-SYD and you later found that LHR-BKK-SYD became available and you wanted to swap to that , then there would be no charge. date/time changes are free too
Originally Posted by jrobin
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.
You could be right there. If you were to do a LONE4 on the single year with WT+ on UK-Oz, then you should be just about on the money to renew. I would also consider whether an alternating status and just getting a Qantas Club membership would perhaps be better value given the great difference in award values. An average of 62.5% bonus on AA ( alternating between 100% and 25% ) is better than a consistent 50% bonus from QF especially given the lower cost of the awards
Originally Posted by jrobin
I gather that AA has a mileage or segment or stop limitation on AA awards? or why would it be two awards?
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It is based on zones. If you go to aa.com and go to Aadvantage -> Partners and mileage programs -> airlines and then go to the Aadvantage Partner Airline award chart you will see the cost for all partner awards . In most cases you have to fly direct from start zone to destination zone., so to do North America to South Pacific youcannot go via Asia. If you go via Asia , it requires 2 awards
There are also One World awards which are mileage based rather than zone based, but getting to NAN was on Air Pacific which is not a OW carrier
Dave