Since you mentioned AY, the AA and AS flights do both credit quite nicely to them, and it's a strictly distance based program for non-AY flights, at least as for now vs. IB and BA being segment based and xx tier points per segment based on length. That may be an advantage or may not, just depends on how your segments fall into their brackets.

AS: D = 200% I = 125%
AA D = 250% I = 150%

You need 45,000 for Gold (OW Sapphire) and 80,000 for Platinum (OW Emerald), sounds like both could be achievable based on your patterns once you see how much longer distance you'll be doing. But there's little incremental benefit of Emerald over Sapphire since you're buying business fares anyway. There might be some theoretical benefit for standby priority, and I believe you can access the QF F lounge in LAX with non-US based Emerald, but you have to decide if that's worth the additional trek over to TBIT everytime as well, personally I'm generally content with the AA FL at LAX. In JFK you'd get the better lounge in T8 (SoHo vs. Greenwich)

The only bad part about AY for now is that their award chart isn't great, but it's expected they'll implement transfer to BA this year sometime, I kind of look at it like AS's new award chart though, if you're racking up bigger multipliers than you would have elsewhere then even a bad award chart isn't that bad.

brosephine69 Welcome to FT (down under branch)
In USA for ever? Or back to AU to live in few years?
Your QF points will expire if you do not have eligible activity in 18 months. So do something to keep them alive say once a year.
QF --> https://www.flyertalk.com/forum/qant...l#post28330576 Has links to other threads on how to keep QF points alive.

QF status has soft landings IIRC. So QF Plat (OWE) to QF gold (OWS). OWS Oneworld sapphire gives you lounge access. As does paid QF club membership for AA.
Unsure if you need the 4 qualifying flights for the soft landings. Have a look in the QF forum and/or AFF.
QF lifetime silver (OW Ruby) does not give you much. But QF lifetime gold (OW Sapphire) does give lifetime lounge access (your life or the life of the current QF ffp rules)

Appreciate all the replies.

Long time Lurker, since I moved to USA 10 years ago, haven't traveled much back to Aus, so doing the QF 4 segments will be difficult. No plans to return to Aus, at this stage. Have kept QFF Account active, by redeeming on AA, but there's minimal points there now.

I may be able to do a UK run, for the 4 BA flights, later this year, but that'll be difficult to make sure I do, so AY and IB seem like the best contenders.

All I need is OWS, OWE is a stretch goal, but likely not that useful while in USA.

Leaning towards AY at this point, But if status is easier with IB, then let me know and I'll sign up for IB instead.

IB Oro status (oneworld Sapphire) requires 2,250 Elite Points. In my previous post, I included a link to an Inside Flyer article which includes the Iberia Plus Elite Points earning chart. Based on the distance of your domestic Business Class segments, you can calculate how many Elite Points you are going to earn from your expected flights. You can do the same calculation for Finnair's program.

Re: achieving status with BA: Courtesy of Head for Points, here's the definition of "eligible flight," of which you'd need four before you could earn BAEC Silver (oneworld Sapphire) status:

"An ‘eligible flight’ is:
any British Airways operated flight
a flight with a British Airways flight code but operated by another airline
an Iberia operated flight with an Iberia flight code"

So if, for example, you were to book an LAX-LON roundtrip with a connection in each direction, you would have your four eligible flights, as long as your connecting AA or AS flights were BA-coded. And if you were to make such a a roundtrip in Business Class, you could earn 560 of the requisite 600 Tier Points needed for BAEC Silver, provided that you connected somewhere on the Eastern Seaboard.

Can't seem to find the Finnair Tier Points earning table. But it seems like I do a lot of flights that are "shorter" (Today's is SAN-PHX-ICT), so not super long haul that Iberia benefits from.

I am starting with my first AA flights this afternoon, Gonna go with Finnair over Iberia/BA.

(I'm 6ft9in and 400lbs, so doing the BA legs, would require paid Biz/First on BA, likely not doable this year for me anyway).

Building up the Avios for redemption later someday is fine.

Finnair does not use a Tier Points system, according to Post #1862:

"Since you mentioned AY, the AA and AS flights do both credit quite nicely to them, and it's a strictly distance based program for non-AY flights, at least as for now vs. IB and BA being segment based and xx tier points per segment based on length. That may be an advantage or may not, just depends on how your segments fall into their brackets. AS: D = 200% I = 125%AA D = 250% I = 150% You need 45,000 for Gold (OW Sapphire) and 80,000 for Platinum (OW Emerald), sounds like both could be achievable based on your patterns once you see how much longer distance you'll be doing."

If you do SAN-PHX-ICT-PHX-SAN in D class, you would earn 380 Iberia Plus Elite Points, of the 2,250 needed for oneworld Sapphire, or roughly 1/6 of the way there. If you credited to Finnair, you would earn 4,696 5,870 miles of the 45,000 miles needed for oneworld Sapphire, or a little more than 1/8 of the way there.

If that trip is representative of your expected travel, then you would achieve status faster by crediting to Iberia, but you would likely amass fewer redeemable Avios with Iberia.

thank you so much for this analysis, I am at the airport about to board and changed to Iberia just in time.

from what I read on AY, i had misunderstood the post (between them talking about Spend on AY metal flights, and tier points I thought it was Avios not tier points).

1/6 vs 1/8 will Definitely be more helpful. Not so worried about collecting the spendable Avios vs actually getting the status. So let’s see how it goes, I should have another set of AA flights going from SNA/LAX to Orlando and back in a couple of months so will do some more research on the connections and see how the routing will be.

thanks again!

You're welcome! Best of luck.

You will find that SNA/LAX-PHX-MCO will generate more Iberia Plus Elite Points than SNA/LAX-DFW-MCO. ;)

yes I did notice that, gotta maximize the legs over 600mi (or 1500 if I can)

I’m now trying to figure out best way to get from SoCal to Orlando, looks like LAX-CLT-MCO and that way the LAX-CLT is a B777 with lie flat. TBD

Just curious but can anyone share how their OW RTW AA-coded segments are crediting to their AAdvantage account? I know it's based on $$ spent, not miles traveled, but I wonder how the ticket is assigning $$ for each segment..
I am thinking of possibly changing programs back to AA but not sure how much I would lose on AA-coded segments.

This is the https://www.flyertalk.com/forum/onew...p-here-47.html thread.

Best to ask *ONE* questions in 1 of the dedicated threads.
https://www.flyertalk.com/forum/onew...r-guide-9.html

See this thread in the AA forum regarding credit for xonex tickets with AAdavantage:
​​​​​​https://www.flyertalk.com/forum/amer...-miles-17.html

It's a huge risk to credit AA coded RTW flights to AA, it seems more and more are crediting based on revenue, not distance, and that's an absolute pittance compared to what you'd get on a distance credit. (Base fare divided up by total miles on the ticket and the AA segments calculated from that). For that matter, you also now have to avoid BA and IB codes too.

There may be ways around it, if your flights have codes available from another carrier and it's not ticketed by AA then you can use the other carrier codes. JL, AY, QR are the best by far, followed by AS and QF between North America and Australia / New Zealand. But even the ones that credit at 100-125% are still better than AA codes if you get slammed with credit by revenue.

The problem is you never know which you'll get with AA until it's already done and too late to change it back to a more lucrative earning on another program.

This is all I needed, thanks!

P.S. - sometimes the goal is not necessarily to gain the most amount of award miles.