I'm trying to use miles to get from NYC to Delhi is Feb. Are BA and Cathay the only oneworld airlines with service to Delhi?

Per AA (where my miles are), I can't fly east (unless I use two awards, one to HKG and one to DEL), so it looks like my only option is BA. Unfortunately, they don't have much inventory.

Any ideas?

you can buy cheap ticket to LHR (AA is running promotion of approx $230) and use award tickets for LRH-DEL..

You don't say if availability is a problem one way or both. If it's both, this won't work. But if it's only sold out one way, then you can use a Oneworld award and route either JFK-HKG-DEL-LHR-JFK going west or the reverse going east. It will fall under the 14-20,000 award and will be 130K in biz, which is a few less than going jfk-lhr-del and return (135k).

Thanks for the responses. There's no availability between LHR and DEL right now in any class. Making the daily calls though, so hopefully somthing will open up.

How do I book oneworld awards? Can I do that through AA?

You do it through whatever frequent flyer mileage program youre using.

Also consider Mumbai and Calcutta. They are each about $300 extra for the couple hour flight to delhi, but they are still options.

Otherwise, you might have to fork up the extra 15K miles and do jfk-nrt and nrt-del on two separate tickets.

Edited to add that Calcutta might not be an option. AI runs to Bombay from CCU but I don't know about Delhi.

[This message has been edited by Darren (edited 10-29-2003).]

Feb is the tail end of peak travel time to India. Peak travel to India has been increasing in duration. Paid business class is full on most airlines during peak times this year (Nov 2003-Feb 2004 and July-Sep 2004).

What are your other constraints? Do you have to go non-stop to DEL or can you connect through other cities. If you can use BOM as connecting point, AA has good award to BOM on Swiss in business class.

LHR-DEL is a tough segment (sometimes abundant availability and sometime nothing for weeks). BA has been asking Indian govt forever to give it more rights to fly to India. However, the problem is that India feels that BA has been seeking a one-sided deal by offering the Indian carrier (AI) really poor landing slots at LHR. I am not sure that this will get resolved soon, so you are not going to see much capacity growth on LHR-DEL on OW.

CX will likely increase capacity to India next year. If you are looking at Winter schedule watch for CX announcements (Indian govt offers a limited open-sky agreement during peak season and CX has applied). Also, there are efforts by AI to fly to US West Coast and usually this is routed via HKG. This means by Feb CX may increase frequency.

As other have suggested, you are better off looking at other cities and connecting domestically using advanced purchase fares on Jet, Sahara or IA (upto 75% off in Coach and about 50% in business).

India is poorly served by OW (especially South India - but your interest is DEL). Star has many, many carriers offering a lot more frequency to India and they are only expecting to increase capacity further in the coming months.

Another twisted option if you do not have a choice may be to get an award to BKK (JFK-HKG-BKK on CX) and connect by paid segment to DEL (lot of competition on DEL-BKK if you go through ethnic TAs)

I just looked at the availability for LON-DEL on BA.com and it looks there is decent availability in Feb. I am not sure if you will have the same availability if you are using AA/QF miles for getting a BA flight for LHR-DEL sector.

Good luck.

rnprasad, unfortunately inventory based on BA EC miles is very different from the inventory seen by AA. This is the only reason I keep miles and status in AA and BA. When there is ample availability in BA, AA shows little. ON the other hand, BA mile redemption in F and even J is more than AA for many routes. (Before the new levels, BA used to be a steal in F compared to AA).