We are leaving for a three month Europe trip on wednesday and I think we need to get started planning our next big trip for next summer! Retirement is great!!!
My wife and I want to do an around the world next year using miles starting in mid May and return in mid to late August.
We have AA miles Me- 238,965 Wife-349,759
US air Me-151,319 Wife-140,076
BA 64500 avios combined
Will start out from LAX (well actually LAS)
Main places I want to visit are:
Angkor Wat & ? (explore from Hong Kong or Malaysia ?) keeping time in this area brief as we don’t tolerate heat well.
Australia
New Zealand
South Africa and Victoria falls
Europe
We want to fly business class (or first if the price is not to much more) on the longer flights. Paying cash as needed for the shorter flights is fine.
Any and all routing and airline and itinerary suggestions are sought as well as booking strategies. Thanks so much for your suggestions!

AA, BA and US are all oneworld carriers, so you will need to look for oneworld routes and award availability.

Use www.oneworld.com to look at the route networks and carriers available.

Some options are:
CX, JL, MH, AA, US for TPAC flights.
CX, JL, MH, QF from Asia to Australia/NZ.
QF (and a few LA flights) between Australia and NZ.
QF from Australia to South Africa
BA, QF, QR, CX, MH, JL for Asia/Australia to Europe.
BA, QR for South Africa to Europe.
AA, AB, BA, IB, US for TATL.

AA and US will be best for the longhaul region-region flights as it has a zone based chart.
BA best for shorter direct flights as it uses a distance based award chart priced per segment.

Wirelessly posted (BlackBerry: BlackBerry8530/5.0.0.601 Profile/MIDP-2.1 Configuration/CLDC-1.1 VendorID/417)

Note that AA and US each have several non-oneworld airline partners. I'm guessing that US' non-oneworld partners will only be available until the AA and US FFPs merge.

And US does not offer one-way redemptions; AA and BA do.

Wow, that's a lot in one trip. You might can use US' lax routing rules to get some of the big legs included on one itinerary. A few examples where using US will beat AA:

You can transit HKG en route to Australia
You can transit Middle East en route from S Africa en route to Europe
You can have a stopover in an international destination

So I would try to build an overarching award itinerary with US miles, then use AA miles for one-way awards for the longer fill-in segments, and use BA miles for the short hops especially if economy suffices (i.e., SYD-MEL, SYD-AKL, HKG-PNH, etc).

Oh, and for searching oneworld airlines, my favorite site is Qantas. BA will show the same (I believe), but Qantas you can get a calendar view of availability by class. Just be sure to avoid BA metal on any long hauls!

Largely copied and pasted from my reply to a similar request, this applies if you are willing to go after UA miles pretty aggressively for the next few months:

Read this post http://travelisfree.com/2013/12/27/c...routing-rules/ as many times as necessary, and collect as many a total of 320K UA/Chase UR points in one account, or 160 each in two accounts. Not too difficult with all the different Chase cards and office supply promos. Then book business class tickets that give you the bulk of your travel, say US-Asia(stopover)-Africa-US. Collect AA and BA miles, and use any leftover other miles and paid LCCs, to fill in the gaps.

US currently has similarly favorable routing rules as has been pointed out, so if there are available seats on Oneworld carriers you create a similar itinerary with a stopover that takes care of most of the longer flights.

Kenny, that link is dead - it goes to a 404 page. If you have it bookmarked as a reference, you should probably delete it.

http://travelisfree.com/2013/12/27/c...routing-rules/

It looks like the shortened version was used in the address in addition to the text. Here is the working link.

Thanks PHLisa and dukerau. I forgot to correct it when I copied.

Thanks everybody for all the suggestions so far. I have limited internet access as we have shut down the house as we leave in the morning for our summer trip! I am not quite sure where to start. Book a one way soon or wait for availability to do return flights to book a round trip with stopovers and then add flights to complete the trip?I have burned a lot of United miles for the trip I an now commencing and don't think I can replenish enough to do this with star alliance .I won't be able to acquire miles until we get back in September.