CarlTheWebmaster

Hello! I'm planning to use some AAdvantage miles to go to Europe. I'm normally a UA/*A person but I have these AA miles so I'm giving it a shot.

I'm in WAS, and in the past had some very enjoyable F awards via LHR to Europe - between the F lounge in IAD and the F product on BA I was pretty happy with the value, but the LHR surcharges and end of BA F ex-IAD make that less attractive.

I've looked at a few itineraries (all in Biz/Flagship/J and all one way - return will be on *A) such as:
WAS-JFK-MAD/BCN
WAS-CLT-FRA
WAS-PHL-ZRH
(Was also contemplating WAS-TYO-FRA just to explore another path).

I find decent availability and not-outrageous mile/$costs, so it comes down to the overall experience and the convenience of the destination.

Two main questions:
1. What do people think about Lounges: Flagship/Dining JFK vs CLT or PHL? I've been to the JFK lounge but not the dining. It's a little easier for me to get to my final destination from FRA or ZRH than from MAD, but it's also more miles (except for one unicorn routing that seems too good to be true). Is it worth the hassle to transit via MAD in order to check out Flagship Dining?
2. When I looked at WAS-TYO and TYO-FRA as two separate One way awards, the mile cost was much lower (50k+) than booked as one multi-city itinerary. Is that normal?

Anything else I should be looking at? Mid-December time frame.

Thanks!

-C

JJeffrey

1) Flagship Dining is nice but not something to go out of your way for (or spend a lot more $$ or miles for). But regardless of that, for Flagship Dining access on AA to Europe you need to be in 3-class F on the 77W (so basically LHR). JFK-MAD on the 772 offers business only so no Flagship Dining access.

2) Not sure what you mean. If you find sAAVer space then WAS-TYO should be 60k in business, and TYO-FRA should be 75k in business, so a total of 135k for a one-way. It should price the same booking multi-city vs. separate one-ways. Assuming you've found decent sAAver-ish award space going to Europe the "normal" way then I could never imaging spending another 70-80k miles just to route through Tokyo (unless you actually needed to go to TYO).

CarlTheWebmaster

Thanks for this! No F so no Flagship dining - makes total sense.

Yeah the TYO option was just sort of noodling. Not worth it if not in full F IMO. I may have misread the options but it sure seemed like the combined was a lot higher, but then again I was looking at lots of routings on lots of dates.

I ended up booking BWI-CLT-MUC and will connect up with others who are transiting MUC on the way to our final destination. That last leg outbound from MUC was only 6k miles on LH, and combined with the 'web special' fare of just over 125k AAdvantage miles seemed like a reasonable deal to me. Via BA and LHR would have been 57k, but like $750 in fees! (Also I like AA biz a lot more than BA biz, or at least I did the last time I flew AA, about 4-5 years ago).

Anyway thanks for the timely and helpful response!