This is an awesome deal
 

Wow - this is a great award and especially if it is all year round. I have tons of miles sitting in a BA account from a few years ago - transfer of Diners points in the 1 for 1 exchange. :) Can now put them to good use.

Yulmichael - I'm assuming that from NA to IPC I can combine AA and Lan and this dosen't have to be an all LAN ticket?

Does anyone have any further information about BA ticket changes policy. In doing some research recently, it still seemed like no changes to partner awards.

I still think best use of miles from U.S. are 90K mi business class to Australia/NZ on UA/* and 120K mi business class to South Africa on NW. (No burning desire to go to Easter Island in the next several years although it's on my "maybe someday" list.)

Compare with 100K business class to Europe on NW which seems preposterous if you're flying from the east coast of the US. I guess it's supply and demand, but you can get great deals to Europe from DC & NY if you watch for sales, whereas there is almost never anything to South Africa from the US for under $1000 even in coach (and in business class you're looking at $6000-10,000 easy).

This thread should really be closed, there have been so many changes in the past 3 years that much of the foregoing is dated and no longer correct. Recent devaluations of WN's RR tix and UA's award chart, plus pending elimination of old DL FF award chart, etc.

One of the best awards has got to be

lhr-jnb or cpt on BA using AA miles 75k for J or 100K for F.
or
Lhr-India on BA using AA miles 60K in J 80K in F.

This also makes intra-Asia business awards at 30k a great deal! HKG-NRT-SIN is about 11 hours in the air!

Best Awards I've Personally Booked

NRT-HKG NH C-Class 30k Miles AC Aeroplan : With prices out of NRT you can't beat the 20/30k intra-asia awards on AC.

BOS-VIE BA C-Class 35k Miles One-Way Asia Miles : While most Asia Miles rewards are a rip-off, this one isn't bad. I wish every program allowed one way awards.

BOS-FRA-BKK-FRA-JFK LH/SQ/TG F-Class 120k Miles : SQ and TG in first. Nuff said.

Most of the other awards are when I need to fly somewhere in the US with a cheapest fare of ~$500 or so and can grab a saver award.

1) I don't know about combining LAN and AA.You have to check the
BA award chart. ( I did JFK-SCL-IPC RT , all on LAN ).

2) I did my trip 3 months ago .When I booked it ,6 months before , the BA
policy was definitely " NO CHANGES ALLOWED ".

Good luck and have a wonderfull trip .

YULMICHAEL

:( I should have kept my mouth shut. Got an e-mail from UAL last night -- as of October 2006 it will take 110K mi to fly business class from North America to Australia instead of 90K. Rats.

It looks like there is a Starpoints to BA promo right now, so you can get an extra 30% bonus when you transfer from SPG-->BA. So 20k SPG results in 32,500 BA (taking into account the 5k SPG bonus and the 30% BA bonus). If my math is correct that means you would only need to transfer 25k SPG points to yield 40k BA miles for the North America to Easter Island award. That's an insane deal...
here is the link to the promo
http://www.britishairways.com/travel...c/public/en_us

Or 80k BA for business class on LAN. Hopefully they won't be charging 120k BA for LAN's new Premium Business class.

One World All-Airline partner awards with AA are fantasic if you are making lots of stops. Just booked gig-mia-iad-jfk-mad-txl-lhr-eze-gru-gig for 100K AA and could have made several more stopovers in the US or Europe if I'd had the time (up to 20k miles). !30K miles for the same award in F is probably a better deal if I'd had the miles.

According to my calculation :
25k SPG points = 30 BA miles ( 25k + 5k bonus )
30k BA miles + 30% = 39k miles .

Michael

Good math, yulmichael
 

Hey, anyone got the link that shows it's only 40k BA miles fromo the lower 48 to IPC (Easter Island)? I want to verify before I transfer 25k SPG points into my empty BA account!

Thanks, all.

Based on the BA award chart, it looks like the entire trip has to be on LA. However, if one is already in SA, then the SA-SA award is only 25k BA miles. So something like EZE-SCL-IPC would work.

Probably already mentioned (sorry, if so) but RT LGA-ANK for 25k in Saver class. That's amazing, IMHO! (May be higher in summer - can't price it out, but still, for the distance, that's nice)