jains100

Dear Forum Members,

I am looking for some advice from the more seasoned travellers amongst you. I am not sure if this is down to the new Avios but there seems to be reduced availability of upgrades all around. I am BA Silver and wish to travel to San Antonio from London in March 2012 on WT+ and if possible upgrade to CW using miles both ways. However this is proving extremely difficult as there is no availability on Lon to ORD and DFW sectors which are the traditional routes BA offers to fly to SAT.

Would it be worthwhile trying to fly through NYC which would hopefully have more seats available or would you suggest another entry point into the US?

Also, can I book a non one world airline airline to complete the journey or better not to?

Is there another oneworld airline I can approach to book this journey using my Sapphire status to upgrade with miles and how do I go about it?
thanks for your help in advance.
Saurabh

Cap'n Benj

What are you using to search?

Looking at just one day in March (7th), ORD-LHR, using the 'Book flights with Avios' on March 7th, there are at least 9 seats in club currently available.

You probably want to look at the Long Haul sectors separately and just upgrade these. You may need to do it over the phone

bernardd

The best routing for me is usually LHR-IAH, then transfer to CO for IAH-AUS (on in your case IAH-SAT). The immigration is rarely hideous in IAH, and you get most of the trip on BA with only short connection to SAT. The downside is BA's combination of bizarre rules makes it extremely difficult to get this all on one ticket so you're protected in the case of a mis-connection AND MFU the TATL sectors.

I generally wouldn't connect in NYC because the ~4 hour flight down to SAT is a real drag after the TATL, and I'm not sure there is a non-stop on AA so you'd fall back into the not protected state again.