Originally Posted by
hourami
Moomba
Thank you. You are correct that I have been infuenced by people on the thread, but in a good way. My routing:
MRU-LHR-MCT-AUH-MCT-LHR-LAX-MIA-DFW-ANC-DFW-ORD-JFK-SYD//ADL-AKL-ADL//CBR-PER-SYD-JNB-MRU
Has been through a few changes. I did want to go to HNL, but there is no first serice on his route and it is a long route. So that was dropped. I wanted to go to LAS and have been advised that it is cheaper to just purchase a ticket/drive from LAX and can therefore also do SFO. Again, I wanted to go to DTW and can from ORD by again purchasing a seperate flight. The other cities of MIA and JFK are still in my planned route. As for ANC, never been to Alaska so this a great opportunity to see it.
I have also never been to Australia so the only places I really wanted to go were MEL and SYD, the other places are an added bonus.
I am eurobased, so when I get gold and requalify for the year, I will do a challenge on AA for status on AA, or just leave it all on BA, still figuring that one out.
That's cool
hourami, I just didn't want you to lose sight of what you were doing.
On the LAX-MIA make sure you try to get the 777 service that is a true 3 class on this route.
You said you wanted to see MEL but it is not in your final routing. Are you going to go there on a separate ticket? You must as it is the best city in OZ (well maybe I am a little biased as I lived there for the first 36 years of my life
)
As to gaining status on AA. You need to ask yourself why. As you will note from my profile I am both AA Emerald and BA Emerald. I recently asked myself why and couldn't find a reason!
If you intend to stick with BA for the future why bother getting status on AA? Go for the GUF2 on BA.
If you think you might like to throw some serious miles at AA in the future then on a miles earning and cost of redemption basis AA wins hands down.
I have a lot of miles invested in AA and have decided to let my BA status slip for the time being and just throw everything at AA.
Of course the above is just my opinion and you need to think about how you would use your miles and what your future travel plans will be. Study the FF guides online for both AA and BA and see if you would be able to take advantage of the top tier benefits for each. You need to think about the restrictions on earning AA miles on BA FF b/w UK and US and visa versa. Will you be able to use system wide upgrades on AA (AA metal only), as opposed to a GUF2 for example?
There are plenty of threads on this forum about which FF programme to use which will give you some more ideas.
Out of interest are you going to do this whole trip in one fell swoop or will you be breaking the journey at some point and flying back to Europe on a separate ticket?
Good luck and enjoy your trip. I am sure you will have a ball.