Hi guys,

Hoping someone can help.

I'm new to the forum, and although I keep an eye on the Flyertalk points page, I'm a little confused about how to go about finding the best deals.

I am currently a Silver card holder with 1,105 points on my account. I am travelling LHR -> LAX (business) at the beginning of Nov, earning 140 points each way. This will put me on 1,385 points. While I am in LA I would like to top up my account to roll it in to Gold Status.

Can anyone offer any advice about the cheapest/most appropriate current solution? I have one spare day where I could make the flights. I'm not sure on how the AA 'instant upgrades' work (do these still exist?) or what deals are currently out there.

Apologies for anyone repeating information. Your help is greatly appreciated!

Thank you!

Welcome to FT!

The FT BAEC forum has a Sticky on earning Avios (and TPs), and you'll find a lot of discussion in that forum about TP runs.

Welcome to FlyerTalk, brown249.

AA upgrades on domestic flights only work for AA Gold and above, not for BA Silver or above. Ie, just because AA and BA are partners doesn't mean they extend all the benefits of their program to their partners, only a limited subset of benefits.

So if you're trying to earn BA status, you have to use your BA frequent flyer number for your AA flight, and you won't get access to any AA upgrades.

However, once you get to BA Gold (oneworld Sapphire), you might be able to reserve exit row and/or other extra-legroom ("MCE") seats if you wish at no cost. If so, that is the greatest extent that you can "upgrade" on AA using BA status. But I'm not absolutely sure about that; I'm just extrapolating from the fact that on some oneworld carriers my Sapphire status (from AA Platinum) has given me the ability to reserve exit row seats that "mere mortals" can't.

BA Gold is oneworld Emerald, the top oneworld tier. As a BA Silver Card Holder (oneworld Sapphire), the OP can already get complimentary MCE seats:

https://www.aa.com/i18n/travel-info/...abin-extra.jsp

If the OP is interested in earning lots of TPs, he is probably interested in instant-upgrade fares, not complimentary upgrades due to oneworld status.

brown249 Welcome to FT

I think is brown249 looking for AA 'instant upgrades' KUP? fares. Not a freebie upgrade.

Look here:
http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/briti...tive-club-446/
http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/briti...os-2016-a.html

A better thread would help " looking for advice on BA tier points from LAX"

Thanks for all your advice so far and for making me feel welcome!

I'm basically looking to find the best/cheapest way of earning 115TP in a day ex LAX (return). That would tip me over into the fabled Gold territory by the time I add on my return flight to the UK.

Any thoughts?

My thought is that you should be asking this in the FT BAEC forum, where lots of folks are chasing cheap TP runs on AA flights.

That would presumably be this thread:
right? guv1976, please keep in mind that the OP seems not very familiar with FlyerTalk yet, so if I didn't find the right thread for the OP, please suggest a better one. Thanks.

brown249, I suggest you look at the introductory posts in that thread, and then ask your question over there. It could help to mention (there) the specific range of dates that you can do these flights.

Not sure why this is still here, I alerted the mods to move this to BAEC yesterday morning.

OP, the BAEC forum is where you want to search...

If you had looked, you would seen that the OP already went to the above-linked thread in the BAEC forum and made two posts there! Don't you know to "Find more posts by" a person by clicking on their username next to the psot?

So there's no need to move this thread, but perhaps a reason to close this thread?