In coach it is 70,000 per person roundtrip (or 35,000 one way). If you don't like the return leg through HKG or can't get that many miles you could fly to HNL in JAL business and from HNL to MCI in AA First for 55,000 miles per person (165,000 total).

Can you help me understand how you calculate this? I am new at this.

I used award nexus to calculate the routes you suggested and it came out as 19456 miles. Is that how you are calculating the route?

AA miles economy come out at 100k miles, so 300k for the three of us.

Where does the 70k come from?

Thanks.

As others have said, getting the Amex cards for MR points for transfer in CO will not happen in the short time left, but it may still be worth it to apply for the Amex cards and bump up points as you could still hold the MR points for any good transfer offers into Delta for example. They are currently running a 50% bonus for MR points until Sept 30, but since Delta is a long time partner with Amex I'm sure more 40-50% bonus transfers will come along after the current sept deal ends. It won't happen for CO as the entire partnership ends Sept 30.

Read AA award chart - http://www.aa.com/i18n/AAdvantage/re...servations.jsp

What you need to read is the All Airlines Award Chart - the route you are looking at is Asia 2 to North America (China is in Asia 2 because HKG is classified Asia 2, so AA lumped China together with HKG started a couple years ago to facilitate easier award redemption.)

If you are lucky you could route it as PEK-NRT-HNL on JL free stopover, then HNL-SFO on AA, all for 35K coach oneway, 55K business or 67.5K First class. But then it depends on a lot of luck to find the HNL-SFO award seat at the peak season of Hawaii travel.

By the way, AA is one-way system, so as UA/CO.

In any case, if you dont have your AA miles now, you can forget about the HNL to Mainland part because Hawaii awards are very sought after and many folks book it long time ago.

The earliest for you to get the 3 x 75K AA miles would be a span of minimum 4 months from today in case you are dreaming for this. Assuming you get instant approval of your pair of personal AA cards, $1.5K spend on Visa and $4K spend on AMEX - assuming you get that all done before 1st statement closes (chances are low to get this done not because of one's spending power, but because Citi's 1st statement closing date is extremely random - you may simply dont have enough time to even spend, before the 1st statement closes. The first 75K x 2 may be posted 2 to 6 weeks after you get them. But since you have to wait at least 61 to 65 days from your initial applications with Citi, before you can do your biz card application - the earliest you could even get a business card (not to mention lately Citi has been very strict in granting the biz cards), it means the earliest you can even apply for that, would be in November...

You can still plan to do this but since you started a new thread in AA forum titled "How to get rid of 225K AA miles?" You may not even want to go through the exercise of applying AA cards to get the bonus for you would NOT be able to use them to help for your upcoming trip, and then you will be "stuck: with the 225K AA miles you deem worthless in your other thread.

As for AwardNexus - you must have not used it correctly because NO airline award charts would ever return an odd number of 19456... They are all in xx,000 or xx,500.

Happy,

Thanks for all the info.

OK, so it seems like the flight within the US to MCI is not included in your calculation. I think that is why you have 70k round-trip and I came up with 100k round-trip.

Yes, that is the conclusion I have also reached. It seems that this trip is too close to take advantage of those miles. From your great feedback and those of others, I'm starting to get convinced to go ahead and apply for the AA offers.

The 19,456 was total flight distance using the Distance Pricer tool and the routes, including MCI, that you suggested.

Wrong. MCI or SFO makes no difference, as long as you do not stop anywhere for longer than 24 hours, except at the North America Gateway.

Asia 2 to North America (including Caribbeans for that matter) is 35K oneway in coach. HNL is North America and if it is the FIRST airport you hit North America, you are entitle to a FREE stopover. The next would be your destination - be it SFO or MCI, it costs nothing extra - same 35K.

If you ALSO stop at SFO (after your stopover at HNL) before you continue to MCI, then you have TWO awards - Asia2 to North America, PLUS Domestic US/Canada. That is 35K + 12.5K.

You will then have the problem of "how to get rid of 225K AA miles..."

Just to be sure, your credit history if it is very thin (because you may not have spent a lot of your working life in US, and not have several cards, car loan, mortgage etc in your file), you may not get the cards at all.

The awards you are looking at are ZONE based, not distance based.

AA has another award called OneWorld award which is distance based. And you MUST use 2 OneWorld partner airlines other than AA plus other rules - completely different animals than the regular awards.

You would be much better off to UNDERSTAND how award works by reading the corresponding airlines forums and in particular the long-running threads on various awards.

Loyalty programs all have their own rules - one of the major newbie mistake is to generalize program rules. This is an absolute No No. The "currency" you use, is the program rules that govern. So if you are using CO miles, it is CO program rules. At this moment, CO and UA dont have the same rules. The 2 programs do not merge until Jan 2012 and new rules have not been made available. Nobody knows which side's rules would survive. You are using AA miles, then it is AA program rules.

Yes, thank you. This is my intention in posting these threads and participating in this forum, to learn.

BTW, credit should be no problem. 10+ years average credit age, max 2 inquiries in last 2 years, 780+ Fico score on all credit bureaus, and good income.

I must give the impression I'm some young college graduate. I'll take that as a compliment.

No, you are given the impression that you have not lived in US for long time. And your 2 inquiries in last 2 years kind of confirming that...

Folks on this forum tend to have 10+ inquiries on their reports each year... all in the name of pursuing miles and points...

Yes, I haven't messed with any US credit over the last few years. I did much credit play about 10 years ago during the balance transfer craze.

Give me another year or two and let's see how many inquiries I can rack up.