Jaenks

ITA: 16.6 AGP-HEL-JFK 17.6 JFK-SFO(or day before) 19.6 SFO-HEL 20.6 HEL-AGP(or day after). Fares starting from 1782 euro. Fare rules: IB INW9C1S4 outbound, IB INX9C1S4 inbound. BA stock is around 2100 euros on that route those days.

He searched correctly, minimum is Sunday night rule.

Bentravels

Hi all, I’m relatively new to all this but diving in after accumulating a decent amount of Avios, feel like gaining status would be a good next step.

Is it possible to do a tier point run but actually turning it into a bit of a holiday i.e. a few days at each stop? Know I’m basically describing a multi-city holiday, but is there a way to easily find something like this?
Could I play around with the layover time in Matrix or would I be better off finding individual flights and stringing it together myself?

Apologies if this is the wrong thread for this!

Chiller3333

This depends on the fares you are looking at.
There are two aspects to this, layovers/transfers and stopovers, both of which you can check in the fare rules for any given fare.

The length of a layover usually is 24 hours (on AA domestic it's just 4 hours most of the time).
Most fares allow for quite a few transfers, which is why they are used for TP runs, so you could stay one day in a given city (other than the destination).

Stopovers are an entirely different story.
Most fares considered here do not allow for free stopovers, as only more expensive ones do.
If I'm not mistaken, most BA fares between Europe and the US charge 600 EUR per stopover in the US and sth like 150 EUR for stopovers in Europe.
You obviously can pay the price (or book more expensive tickets) to get the stopovers, but it makes everything much, much more expensive.

An alternative that remains is booking segments separetely.
For instance, you can combine one of the cheap NYC-RDU fares with some cheap-ish ex-RDU fare and stay in the research triangle for a few days in between.
That obviously is a much harder problem to solve than just booking a cheap fare and returning after the minimum stay as many here would

xenole

Is there anything with more than 4 sectors possible out of SEA?
Been looking at using a voucher I've got, and can do day returns (times not great) of things such as:

SEA-DFW, DFW-SAN, SAN-PHX, PHX-SEA for £325ish in first / 160TP / 10k Avios (2 or 3 meals on those flights is possibly a bonus).

Or shorter hops involving PHX both ways rather than DFW.

Cw novice

There are ways you can combine a West Coast USA trip with the current double TP offer for holidays to get to around £1.5 per TP. My routing is an open jaw of EDI-LHR-JFK-LAX, SEA-PHL-LHR-EDI. I have 4 nights in LA and 4 nights in SEA.

I will book a separate AS/AA flight for LAX-SEA in due course, this wasn't bookable as part of the holiday as there was no codeshare

The real difficulty with West Coast trips booked as a holiday is getting J from the West Coast back to East Coast on the transcon. I had given up on this and thought I would have to give up on the return. Luckily when I did the trip as an open jaw, the system through up a return via PHL which gave the 140tp. Yes it's in a recliner but it's also a day flight.

This will give 1280tp and after valuing the hotels at £1,100 (they were £1500 on booking) works out to be be £1850 for the flights.

All ticketed through BA with BA flight numbers throughout and is being paid off monthly. The cherry on top will be if I can upgrade the LHR-JFK leg to F.

With the qualification for gold being 1125tp until 31 December and my tp year beginning on 8 September I should get 2 years of gold from this trip and a year of silver.

Please see below:

nickdel

Looking at options for London to Las Vegas in September. I've tried the usual DUB-LHR-JFK route and whilst prices are great the timings are not... any recommended alternatives I could look at?

ISTFlyer

Try ex-Sofia or ex-Spain for a better price.

Neil Scrivener

I may be teaching you to suck eggs - but it's worth watching the Covid-19 testing. It's currently (in theory) 24hrs your flight - though it's a grey area as the say "the day before".

However, if say, you booked DUB-LHR-JFK (or SOF-LHR-UK, etc) it's unlikely the Carrier will book you in to your DUB-LHR/SOF-LHR leg without a proof of negative Covid test for the USA..... This may be even in the event if you were able to prove you had a long layover in LHR and intended to book the test there before your JFK flight.

The point here is that if you need to get from LHR to DUB or SOF to start the journey - and then your layovers in DUB or SOF and/or LHR are long.....it COULD place you outside the 24 testing period......and this COULD be problematic when checking in!

I only point this out as I had a similar issue with American Airlines recently

RichieMc

Hi gang. Rather new here. To retain Gold, I have used ITA Matrix to build a good trip for September using the tried and true SOF-LAX route although I still need to fine tune it to get a better routing.

Problem is that to retain Gold next year, I need to actually achieve it this year! It so happens that with just normal flying, and going in J where it was cost effective, I'm currently only 280 points shy of Gold. So I don't need a mega complex west coast trip, which is what usually gets discussed here. My year ends in April. I've been playing around with shorter European routes involving an LHR-HEL or LHR-SOF leg. Best I can come up with is LHR-SOF RT for £210 end of March. I guess I could spend 2 sonsecutive weekends in Sofia in a pinch. Or stay 5 nights and get double points on BA Holidays. I could even just do a LHR-JFK run in J but I cant get anything for less than £1500. LHR-TLV can be had for around £1000, still not great value...although I obviously don't expect expect 1tp/£ right now! I'm London based but get to Geneva fairly regular, so could use that as a start and end point if that's any use.

Anyone have any ideas for a short/medium haul trip that could even double up as a short city break? I don't mean to outsource the legwork, but I'm just getting nowhere randomly inputting destinations.

nufnuf77

USA is not grey area - the rule is day before, not 24 hours. you can test 1am on saturday and depart 11pm sunday to be within rules

Neil Scrivener

Yes indeed. That's what I meant by a grey area. It's very open to interpretation - and I wonder if there is any overzealousness in that respect. I may be completely wrong of course, and I hope I am - but I'm erring my plans on a 24hr test before flight than closer to 48hrs

Cw novice

Have you considered doing EDI-LHR-SOF as the routing this will give 240tp and you could get a J flight to EDI for the remaining TP and then a reward flight or sleeper (see below) back. You don't even need a stay in London for the outbound looking at the timings.

On the return I don't know if you would make the last flight from EDI back to LON but you could always do the Caledonian sleeper back to London if you need to be at work Monday first thing.

skunker

No, the rule is very clear that is the day before so as to avoid problems with very early or very late flights and allows for delays. There is nothing grey about it and is actually intended to be traveler friendly.

Camflyer

Just been looking at some European city breaks in order to get to 450 TP and a Silver card by April. There are some attractive CE fares to Spanish destination on IB via MAD for around £100 each way. Takes a bit longer but a good chance to visit the excellent MAD lounges and 120 TP return.

RichieMc

Thanks Cam and CW. Good shouts on both. We have an office in Edinburgh so quite easy to find an excuse to be there for the start of the journey and no need to stress about getting back to London on Monday morning.

Thanks again!!