AA vs BA
 

Hi all.
Wanted to ask a few questions about a comparison of the two.
My brother is moving to England and is looking at which of the two would be best. Not buying a lot of high end tickets. More of a casual flyer.
I would think this leans heavily to AA, a program I'm familiar with.

But being in England he is afraid he'll have foreign transaction fees on his AA credit card and therefore thinking about going with BA instead. Also the bonus is 55k for BA instead of 40k for AA. I told him I thought that was about similar in actual usability, but I am not sure on that.

Most of his flights will be within europe or to the east coast of the US.

Thanks for the opinions.

I have BAEC and AAdvantage accounts (and a CX Marco Polo account for that matter - I only mention this as these are the OW FF programs I'm familiar with) , when possible I ALWAYS bank my miles on OW airlines in my AA account, for various different reasons. Here's what I dislike about BAEC:-

BA charges outrageous YQ prices on award bookings.

BA has three different zones in Europe and mileage requirements differ accordingly.

BAEC think nothing of putting the customer on hold for a looooong looooony time at least when I've called them from Canada, not sure if it's any better in the UK.

Overall, I need to redeem more BA miles than AA miles for the same award.

To be honest, the only think I can think of that I like about the BA program is that you can have a household account (not 100% sure if the rules change depending on where you reside).

If your brother accumulates a lot miles from credit cards, obviously it doesn't make any sense to have a card that would charge foreign transaction fees.

Go ahead and tell your brother to get the AA Citi card for the 40k miles if he can spend $1000 in the US on it before he goes, or is willing to eat the $30 in FOREX charges, which really is totally worth 40k miles.

Then apply for the AA card in the UK. It only has a 5k signing bonus, but he'll earn 1.5 points per pound on purchases and 3 per pound on gas.

Excellent.

Thanks so much for that. Will pass it along.

I must say from a selfish standpoint I am hoping AA turns out to be the best for him because its a program I know, or at least know better than the other.

Wirelessly posted (BlackBerry8530/5.0.0.601 Profile/MIDP-2.1 Configuration/CLDC-1.1 VendorID/417)

BA is more liberal with stopovers on award travel. But with a BA redemption, you'll pay the fuel surcharge regardless of whether you fly BA or AA TATL. With an AA redemption, you'll only pay the surcharge for segments flown on BA metal.