Advice on OneWorld Award - OW80C
 

Hello All -

I'm looking for advice on a OneWorld Award that I'm trying to put together. Specifically, I'm trying to redeem two OW80C awards for next summer for some European travel. Despite the fact that I'm a 1P (and hopefully soon-to-be 1K) on United and have no status at all on AA, my current plan is to redeem a Marriott Travel Package and use those miles, combined with some leftover ones in my AA account, to redeem for this award because it seems to be a better value than what UA can offer me.

Over a period of about 16-17 days, we plan on visiting Barcelona, Brussels, Amsterdam, and London. Although the order and specific dates are generally flexible, we already have a 7 night award reservation at the Renaissance Chancery Court London from July 6-July 13 and are trying to work around that. We're based out of DCA.

Here's the itinerary that I've come up with so far - I'm not that familiar with OneWorld so I'm looking for any/all advice that you folks might have.

Saturday, June 28 - Sunday, June 29
IAD-MAD IB6188 (19:00-08:20 next day) connecting to:
MAD-BCN IB2614 (11:05-12:15)

Tuesday, July 1
BCN-MAD IB2627 (17:55-19:05) connecting to:
MAD-BRU IB3208 (20:00-22:15)

<----> Ground transit from BRU-AMS <---->

Sunday, July 6
AMS-LHR BA439 (16:25-16:35)

Sunday, July 13
LHR-MAN BA1384 (7:40-8:40) connecting to:
MAN-ORD AA55 (10:40-13:00) connecting to:
ORD-DCA AA1442 (16:30-19:25)

By my calculations, this works out to 8,593 miles - well within the boundaries of the OW80C award.

I have confirmed availability on all of these flights via AA.com/Qantas. Although we would prefer to start our trip on Friday, June 27, there does not seem to be any availability at this time. My plan would be to book the trip as-is and then hope that two seats would open up in the future.. if they didn't, no big deal, but as I understand I could change the dates if availability opened up as long as the routing stayed the same.

Additionally, the double connection on the way back is not ideal, but I had a very hard time finding any direct LON-ORD/JFK/BOS/RDU/etc availability during the period in question so I settled on MAN-ORD for the TA leg.

I would love to try out BA on a transatlantic leg, but despite the fact that there is plenty of availability (per Qantas), that does not seem to be in the cards given the restriction imposed by AAdvantage.

Although we are very interested in efficiency, I'm also very interested in having the best possible travel experiences - particularly on the TA legs - so any advice or alternatives would be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance.

The itn looks good to me.

If you want to try BA you can but that will involve couple of more connections. WAS-NYC-Toronto/Montreal-LHR would be a possibility. You can't use AA miles on US-UK BA routes but everything else is possible.

I recently did WAS-ORD-YYZ-LHR... to take BA across the pond. Very good decision on my part.

Low/nil probability of getting award seats on Fri for TATL; push it up to Thurs. If later Friday does shake loose, you can freely change the dates of the itin. of a OW award (and I did so months after ticketing), just not the routing.

Better place for OW answers is the oneworld forum down in the alliances section.

Steve

If you're willing to change the order of the cities, you can also use BCN-LGW or BCN-LHR on BA or IB. That could eliminate one of your flights.

Thanks for the input so far - I will check availablility for BA via Canada, and see if I can rework the order of the cities to take advantage of BCN-LON direct.

Mods, please feel free to move this to the OW forum if it would be better served there.. I completely forgot about the alliance forums when I put it here.

For more input from some of our very knowledgeable oneworld members, and at the request of the OP, this thread will be relocated to the oneworld Forum. Thank you!