Easter Island w stopovers AA & BA on Business
 

I was wondering if I could get some advice. We have 140K in AA miles and 100K in BA miles and want to go to Easter Island from SFO with stopovers in Peru (ideally Cuzco) and Santiago. I would like to fly the direct LAN flight from SFO-LIM on business as it looks very nice. Right now I am thinking of booking an AA award to Peru and then booking flights from Peru to Easter Island with a stopover in SCL.

Any other ideas?

If this isn't the right place for this let me know, I'm a newbie.

This type of award is certainly doable between your AA and BA miles. You check how do best combined them. I don't know the AA award rules but you might be able to use them all the way with a stopover on the way to IPC in LIM and on the way back in SCL.

Enjoy Easter Island. A magical place.

Welcome to FT! (And watch out for double posting - a no-no.)

AA regards Easter Island (IPC) as being in the Southwest Pacific for award purposes, while BA regards it as South America.

So for your AA miles, you'd need either to make it two "all-partner" awards, N. America < > S. America and S. America < > SW Pacific, for which you don't have sufficient miles, or else an AA "Oneworld" award, which requires two OW partners in addition to AA (if AA is used at all) per itinerary. Oneworld awards are mileage-based while all-partner awards are continent/region-based.

To use a Oneworld award you'd have to include a second OW airline; the easiest would be Mexicana. So an eligible route would be something like SFO LA LIM LA IPC LA SCL LA MEX MX SFO. That's around 15,000 miles and would fall into the tier requiring 130,000 AA miles for business class.

For BA, I believe you're only allowed one stopover per direction, so you'd have to make IPC your turnaround point, and use LIM and SCL as your stopovers, making your own way to CUZ. However, check the mileage requirements with BA when more than one partner is used, or else you may have to travel on separate itineraries, one person using Lan and Mexicana, the other using only Lan.

Thanks for the feedback. I forgot to mention that we have 140K on AA and 100K on BA for 2 people. Since the distances are pretty far, I'm not sure if the oneworld awards would work.

Meaning each person has a combination of AA and BA miles? AA miles can be transferred (at a cost) but can't be pooled; BA has a family account option, but not sure how it works to merge existing accounts.

The following itinerary

SFO - LIM - IPC - SCL - SFO

is available on LAN using 40K BAEC miles in Coach (or 80K in Business) per person. If it were me, I'd figure out how to accumulate 60K more BA miles to fly business, and save my AA miles for other itineraries.

The 140K on AA and 100K on BA are total available for 2 people. I would love to do it all on BA but don't know how to get 60K more soon. I am looking at booking this for July travel. At this point I am looking at using 120K on AA (SFO to PEM-Puerto Maldonado and LIM-SFO on business) for the bookends and 100K on BA (PEM-IPC with a stopover in CUZ-Cuzco) and then IPC-SCL(Stopover)-LIM.

That's the best I can come up with.

I am trying to work a variant of this problem.

Two of us are already ticketed, in September,
AUS-MIA-LIM-IQT and IQT-LIM-LAX-AUS,
Business Class, the long legs on LAN for better seats.

We used 60K AA miles, as BA insisted they could
not include the LAN Peru legs LIM-IQT-LIM, nor could BA
come even close to the availability AA had open.

1) I hope to add LIM stopover on return.

At ticketing deadline, AA said LIM stop not possible.
I hadn't studied the rules enough to know.
Maybe convert to open jaw, buying IQT-LIM one way?
Likely to suffer a change fee, oh well.....,

2) IF that is doable, would try a separate business ticket,
preferably using BA miles, for LIM-SCL-IPC-SCL-x-LIM.

Some experimenting I did on BA.com surprised me,
needing less BA miles for LIM-IPC-LIM than SCL-IPC-SCL

Anyway, we will be slowly working a similar problem as OP.

Thanks for getting this thread alive,
and hope we can share solutiions along the way. @:-)

I am having the same problem with BA as they don't have intercountry LAN Peru flights available. I am currently thinking of doing

SFO-LIM-PEM and LIM-SFO on AA Miles (60K Business)
and
LIM-SCL-IPC (Stopover in SCL) and IPC-SCL-LIM with BA miles (50K Business)

I wish I could trade 60K AA miles for 60K BA miles to make it a better value and do SFO-LIM-SCL-IPC (stopover in LIM) and IPC-SCL-LIM-SFO (stopover in SCL) for 80K in Business for each

It looks like I will have to pay for PEM-CUZ and CUZ-LIM unless I try to use AA miles for those.

You can buy 40.000 AA miles for $800. Special promotion (20% discount).

I got the following itinerary for July in Business using BA miles.

SFO-LIM-SCL-EZE(Stop)-SCL-IPC(Dest)-SCL(Stop)-LIM-SFO.

It's a great use of BA miles.

I ended up "borrowing" some BA miles from my brother (after all, I did tell hime about the Chase 100K offer:) and booked
SFO-LIM(stopover)-SCL-IPC, IPC-SCL(stopover)-LIM-SFO
in business for 80K each. I'm glad with the value I got from the BA miles. Now I'm trying to figure out whether to use AA miles for inter-Peru flights or pay out of pocket.

jablmuth,

I actually am planning a NYC-(some stopover)-IPC-(some stopover)-NYC based on your post about this deal in the BA 100,000 CC thread and another OW thread.

I have enough BA miles to fly a friend and myself on this itin. The question is, how can you figure out what stopovers are available? Do I search this on the LAN website using multi-cities and calling BA to book?

P.S. Any recommendations for a stopover?

The BA award is a single partner award, and therefore I recommend that you investigate LAN routes on the LAN website. To my eye the most obvious potential stopovers are LIM, SCL, EZE, and GYE, while I'm sure that others are available as well. Partner awards with stopovers need to be booked by phone with BAEC, but I'd advise first checking award availability on ba.com.

Thanks jbalmuth. I actually did try the BA site to test out a few itineraries, but I heard over here that the site isn't always accurate and to look at OW routes through their partner sites instead before calling BA to book.

I was actually at the LAN site, but it doesn't look like you can search award availability without being a LAN member. Since I'm still a bit green on FT, I wanted to see how people were seeing if a stopover is available as opposed to a layover.