In general, you can receive both award and status miles on AA for BA flights, but you cannot earn AA miles for BA flights from London to the US. Conversely, you cannot earn BA miles on AA flights from the US to Europe.

Antitrust agencies on both sides of the pond decided that if AA/BA could codeshare and give miles on their collective flights on these routes, this would equate to unfair competition since they together hold something like 70% of the London-US market.

Again, this applies only to transatlantic flights, a BA flight to Dubai or wherever earns regular status and award miles on AA. Same for flights to Canada, Mexico, the Caribbean - anyplace that is not in the US.

The one exception to the rule are BA flights to the US from Manchester - these earn normal miles as well, since the antitrust issue is only about London.


What I meant with the bit about earning award miles but not status miles was that you could credit the BA flights where you cannot earn AA miles to Alaska Airlines instead. They would not count for status on Alaska, but they would give you redeemable miles on Alaska.

So like I said:

if you don't expect to fly BA transatlantic very often: use AA and Alaska

if you expect to fly BA transatlantic a lot - go with Cathay, and pay the 50 bucks. (BTW - this is a one-time fee joining fee as long as you have four flights per year.)