Award Tel Aviv vs. Istanbul
 

trying to book aadvantage award from either istambul or tel aviv back to the usa in economy class. while istambul shows 20.000 miles required in best case, tel aviv however is 45.000 miles in best case according to aa.com. can this be? those two airports are not toooo far away...

Yes, but the line dividing Europe from Asia passes between them.

Before the rules were changed some years ago, TLV was considered Europe while AMM was Middle east, now that was rather blatant.

its a bit strange. booking tlv-mad-nyc in 1 ticket would be 45.000 aadvantage miles. booking tlv-mad and mad-nyc (for december) in 2 tickets, it would be 20.000 miles + 20.000 miles for a total of 40.000 miles. off course, the later option would not protect me at a misconnect...

Book it from Larnaca, Cyprus. Cheap and very quick flights from TLV, but Cyprus is still "Europe."

Wirelessly posted (BlackBerry: BlackBerry8530/5.0.0.1030 Profile/MIDP-2.1 Configuration/CLDC-1.1 VendorID/417)

You would be protected if the TLV-MAD flight were on IB, and the MAD-JFK flight were on AA. And, of course, you could stop over in MAD if desired.

But for 45K, you could fly nonstop from TLV to JFK/EWR on LY, which is also an AA partner.

Never heard of this airport but before but sounds like a good idea! I did some searching for fares from LCA to TLV and the cheapest I could find was $350+ round trip. Is there somewhere else to find cheap fares for this route?

You can put the 2 awards on the same record if available and booked at the same time. Multiple awards do not necessarily require multiple tickets.

Most of Turkey is considered Asia. Half of Istanbul is in Asia. The airport in Istanbul is to the west of the city which is the European part of the city/country.

Airline award regions are drawn by marketing people, not cartographers. IST and TLV are in different redemption bands because the AAdvantage rules say so - it's nothing more than that.

LH used to consider TLV Europe for award purposes. Not sure if that's still the case.

Consider your connections - I seem to recall LCA-TLV to be late evening flights, LCA-LHR in the afternoon.

No international stopovers are permitted unless on a oneworld award.

Not exactly true unless Canada, for instance, has become a part of the USA in the last few days.

The award in question is now known as an "Explorer" award.

Huh? The comment about being able to stop over (post #5) was made regarding a 2-award trip (20K+20K).