My wife and I are planning to go to England (either LGW or MAN) from RDU in late March or early April (have some flexibility). All fall, there has been no availability of 50k seats, but in the past couple weeks, they have opened them up.

My problem, I have 85k in my US account and probably won't have 100k for another month. I am wondering if I should snag one award seat now and hope that I can get another one on the same itinerary when I get the rest of the miles a month from now. Or wait and hope that seats are still available when I have 100k miles.

A backup strategy would be to use my US miles get a 60k *Alliance award on AC and go LHR via YYZ and then transfer Amex reward points to Aeroplan to get the second seat directly from AC. That strategy uses more miles and could run into complications if all of a sudden seats were available through AC but not through a US *Alliance award.

any thoughts? I'll have 90k US miles by Nov 20th and could bite the bullet and pay for the last 10k miles, but I would rather not if I didn't have to.