OK guys - so now I'm really confused. I am a QFF Bronze - not far short of Silver - (another 110sc's). But I'm a QC member anyway so it's only the 25% bonus that is of any interest. I have booked the LONE4 below to depart next week and now I'm having a panic attack that I should be disregarding my QFF earning and going for the AA plat challenge.

Here's the problem - I don't know what the challenge is (yes I did search?) Can I get it as an Aussie? Are the carriers/routes below best suited to AA or QF.. or should I use both FF cards depending on which sector I'm travelling

So can I have some suggestions on how and if to take plat challenge or stick with QF totally - given that: 1. routing/carriers below are now fixed 2. I am more interested in earning maximum points than anything else

QF PER-MEL
QF MEL-BNE-NRT
CX NRT-HKG
AY HKG-HEL
AY HEL-AMS
BA AMS-LHR
BA LHR-DME
AY SVO-HEL
AY HEL-JFK
AA JFK-MIA
AA MIA-ATL
AA ATL-ORD
AA ORD-YVR
AA YVR-DFW
AA DFW-LAX
QF LAX-AKL
QF AKL-ADL-PER

Thankyou so much for advice (cross posted on QF forum)

AA Platinum is the same status as QF Gold, giving you QC access (as well as all OW business lounges) while traveling on any OW airline. But if you have already paid for a QC membership what is the value of that? QF won't suspend or refund your QC fee just because you are now AA Plat and can get in that way. So it is a somewhat useless benefit. The real question is whether you can make good use of the miles in Aadvantage. You'll have about 40K miles which is enough for a free ticket on some routes but not enough for the better awards (see http://www.aa.com for details). If these are orphaned miles (you won't accumulate more into AA) it may not be as useful to you as QF miles. In general AA miles are worth about 1.5 QF miles (a legacy of QF being kilometre based and taking advantage of that when switching to OW miles) so you are right in thinking that AA would be more valuable. But only if you earn enough to redeem the award you want. The rules changed this year for coach RTW to make it far less attractive for earning mileage; it is rather complicated and the rules are different in each plan and for each OW carrier (you'll have to research it as I haven't done so, since I will never buy a coach RTW -- not really competitive with consolidator tickets though those generally don't earn mileage).