OK have some questions as I am trying to plan an award trip to BOM on OneWorld airlines. Am going to a friend's wedding early next year. Would like to travel in F.

Options seem to be:

1) CX- JFK-HKG-BOM-HKG-JFK. This would be 140k miles using a CX award. Upside: seems to be cheapest award. Downside: no F from HKG-BOM, only J and 24 hour layover on the way home.

2) AA/BA- JFK-LHR-BOM-LHR-JFK. This would be 200k miles using an AA/BA award. Upside: shorter routing. Downside: more miles.

3) OneWorld Award on AA/CX/BA- JFK-HKG-BOM-LHR-JFK (or other direction). This would be 180k miles (I think). Upside: slightly cheaper than option 2. Downside: slightly more expensive than option 1.

Any comments or ideas? Have I missed anything here. Am leaning towards option 1 given what appears to be a mileage "bargain". The only thing that bothers me is that there is no F option from HKG-BOM-HKG. Assume that if I want to fly F JFK-HKG-JFK I will still need to spend the 140k miles despite being in J for part of the trip. Layover doesn't really bother me as I might turn it into two days and visit HKG (which I have never been to).

Am looking for any input or thoughts anyone might have.

Thnx

I'm not sure if this is possible under the award rules, but since the HKG-BOM flight stops anyway in BKK you might be able to extend your sojourn in CX First by taking a 3-class flight HKG-BKK, spending a little time there (go see the Grand Palace etc.) then getting the 773 flight BKK-BOM.

Looks like most of your miles are on AA. The best F award to India from North America is on BA with BA miles. If AA/BA get limited anti-trust immunity maybe there will be some new choices there.

You have the choices down OK. Also consider JAL option with AA miles. This is sometimes better (but I cannot recall if they have F all the way). AA has been codesharing with Swiss into India and has an award option on that as well. Worth taking a look at. PLAT desk can help list all the choices for you. EXP desk has always been helpful for me in the past (I call and give them guidelines, they take a few hours researching this inbetween other calls and call back with detailed info, availability, etc.)

For the future, you could have used the Diners transfer option to transfer the miles to BA (you lose 50% in transfer of AA to Diners but gain it back with the double promotion until Aug 31, 2002). Even though there is a 50K limit on miles per year to Diners, you can get mutliple certs and get more miles transferred most of the time. It is too late to try this for this year. See if Webflyer has any promotions on BA in the near future (unlikely). The Webflyer promotion on Diners is a good one to collect BA miles (again too late now to get the transfer completed in time by Aug 31).

Another option to "buy" BA miles is to use Starwoods promotions (if Webflyer has another one in near future). At under $0.02 per mile, you do get Biz for $2K and first under $2.5K (120,000 miles with online booking bonus). Note that BA has much better availability for BA EC members rather than AA or other OW members.

On the plus side for AA, AA awards are reroutable, can be issued with shortnotice at AA ticketing places. BA awards are non-reroutable after the journey starts and need a lot of notice to reroute or issue before the start of the trip. In other words availability is better for BA but processing is poor.