Originally Posted by
ffdom
Thanks for the ideas! I have 7 days in the England before heading down to the Gulf. My constraint is that I need to leave LHR on 3/3 and arrive into RUH that day for en early morning meeting on the 4th. I will have a couple of nights in Riyadh and then have 3 or 4 days leeway to get me back to LAX.
It looks like the Global Explorer is your best bet, although in business class only the 34,000-mile product is available, priced about the same as a 4-continent Oneworld Explorer ($8400) if originating in the US.
The GlobEx allows travel on GF metal using either GF or AA codes, so if you can get it ticketed with AA nos. (not sure if that's doable or not given the MAN stopover) you could get up to 51K Q-points for your EXP quest.
If you start at LAX you can't come back to/through LAX until the end of the trip, and if you want to use as many of the allowed miles as possible (and given your time constraints you don't have a lot of time to run around Asia or such) then a route like SAN AA ORD AA MAN (AA/BA) LHR (AA/GF) BAH (AA/GF) RUH (GF) BAH BA LHR BA SIN CX HKG CX LAX AA JFK AA ORD AA SAN would get you close to maximum mileage yield over the course of the year's ticket validity. (I.e. you treat LAX as a stopover rather than origin/destination.)
I suspect the GlobeEx will be cheaper than separate round trips between the US and UK, and UK and middle east, but I would check it.