CA Trip using BA/AA miles
 

I am relatively new to the whole mileage game but due to the various strategies on this board am relatively mile-rich :). I have ~100K AA miles and will soon have another 100K BA miles. My wife will have 100K BA miles as well. Now my question is I plan to purchase 4 tics and visit CA/Arizona (various places). I plan to fly to atleast 3 different places in CA/Arizona (SFO, LAX, etc). My home base is IAD/DCA. How do I best use my AA/BA miles. Also, is this a candidate for OneWorld mileage based tics? Thanks in advance for your help.

easy
go and book an award tix on their websites.

look at aa and ba web sites for 1 world and partner awards....you might be able to use ba for us domestic as well as the aa....good luck...

ps....read the stickies in the aa and ba forums....

just my 2 cents..people here on FT would tell you to use your miles on premium seats (Business, First Class)....as it is typically much more expensive thus making it more worth it.

back to your question: using a one world award mileage based ticket will not be worth is because a trip consisting of only 4000-6000 miles costs 60,000 miles!!! that is an ridiculous amount. I'm not sure exactly what your plans are, but since you seem to have 300K miles spread over 3 different accounts, I would try to get 4 award tickets to California. You can do a stopover in one of the places. let's say DC-LA(stopover)-SFO...or something and then drive to the rest of the places from either LA or SFO.

If you use BA miles to book a domestic award on AA, you are entitled to unlimited, free en-route stopovers, as long as you are flying along the "most direct route," however that is interpreted by BA. If you use AA miles to book a domestic award on AA, you get no free stopovers.

I believe that an award with stopovers has to be booked over the telephone with BAEC; I do not believe that such an award can be booked on line.

Assuming you are going coach, I wouldn't do it. Using miles for domestic coach is usually not good value (although if you can work in all your stopevers this may change things).

Use your miles for a biz trip to Europe or Aisa or South/Central America. Better value. :D

If you do choose to use your BA miles for a domestic trip, you can get an open jaw ticket for the same price as a round trip domestic ticket (25,000 miles). So for example, fly to Los Angeles and return from San Francisco. Take Amtrak or Southwest Airlines in between.

Wirelessly posted (BlackBerry8703e/4.1.0 Profile/MIDP-2.0 Configuration/CLDC-1.1 VendorID/104)

Since AA awards are now one-way, the OP can do an open-jaw coach trip on AA for 25,000 AAdvantage miles as well. The real question is: Does BA allow a free stopover in SFO on an AA award from LAX-WAS (or a free stopover in LAX on an award from SFO-WAS)?