I am from NYC and travel almost exclusively with oneworld airlines.

Unless I've been wrong for a long time, you can not earn regular or base miles for your AA account on BA transatlantic flights. I would rather fly BA JFK-LHR (better service, in my opinion), but that wouldn't go towards my ExecPlatinum status. So, I'm stuck with AA to London.

I haven't done this, but when connecting to another European city from LHR, it seems like more of a pain to transfer from AA to BA rather than just BA to BA. One or two times I had to connect in LHR, I just screwed the miles and flew BA the entire way.

Now that Finnair is in the oneworld boat, I could fly that to HEL and connect to the other European city (you can earn AA miles on Finnair, right?). I hope Swissair joins oneworld, because that would open up even more oneworld possibilites in Europe. What about Aer Lingus?

I think that AA should cut all flights into LHR, get slots at LGW, fly there, and place their code on all BA flights. Then all of us poor AA flyers can finally earn BA miles transatlantic! But that doesn't look it is happening fast. Maybe I should see what Star has to offer?

Looking forward to hearing your opinions,
Flyer

I suspect this rule may have been applied for two reasons:

1. to placate the FAA, British and ECC regulators back when AA and BA proposed a merger of sorts a few years ago. The charge was that they would have a strangle hold on almost half the flights across the Atlantic from JFK to LHR particularly.

2. I also suspect that AA knows it has a tough task to match or beat BA's F-class and Concorde services, and possibly J-class too, so this way they didn't want to risk seeing all their top flyers migrate to BA on the London-New York route if they could accrue mileage across the Atlantic.

As for Gatwick, it has never been a favourite of business travelers because it has had such a poor reputation as a charter hub. AA had to get out of there -- they used to fly into it -- and the deal with BA opened up LHR slots.

I think AA still goes to LGW from DFW and RDU.

jl

one flight from bos as well.

Gatwick is a very good airport. You can fly non-stop to more locations in the US from Gatwick than you can from Heathrow. Many of the flights from London to South Africa leave only from Gatwick. Gatwick still has a fair number of charters (most leave from the North Terminal) but many charters have migrated out to Lutton and Stanstead airports. The car rental lots are located on site at Gatwick and thus save you time--at Heathrow you have to wait for a van/bus to take your car. Heathrow and Gatwick both have express trains into London. If you want to earn more miles, the routing from Dallas to Gatwick on AA is longer than the routing from Chicago.

Actually, I was only quoting the "general concensus" about Gatwick. I too always found it nicer to fly into than Heathrow back in the days that it was Cdn's point of entry into the UK.