A Little Food For Frequent Flying Thought – All Mileage Programs are Not Created Equal

Last week I booked 2 First Class tickets from DC to London Heathrow on American Airlines using AAdvantage miles.  This is for a long weekend trip to a family wedding.  We are leaving Wednesday, and returning Sunday.  Of course, every flight American offers between the US and London wasn’t available, but I certainly got acceptable schedules on the days I wanted, and at the MileSAAver level of 125,000 miles each.  What can I say except….saaweeeet!

You might remember that I have a separate trip to Rome planned for late June on American, again booked at the MileSAAver level, albeit in business class since that’s all American offers to/from Rome.  So this summer I’ve managed to spend 450,000 AAdvantage miles at the restricted level, and gotten transportation to/from Europe in a premium class of service to 2 pretty popular European destinations.  The sad part?  My AAdvantage balance is now 1,688 miles!  But I’m working on building that back up as I type from seat 6B via GoGo Inflight Internet aboard an American flight!

For what it’s worth, I priced Delta SkyMiles for the same London trip.  I was able to find seats, but the cost was 200,000 miles per person in Business since Delta doesn’t offer a First Class cabin on international flights.  I priced United in First and Business.  First was not available at the saver level, but I could get a standard award for 270,000 per person.  The standard Business award on United was 210,000 miles.  In fairness, historically, United has had ok availability, and normally, I would’ve been searching for these tickets much further in advance.  But the results for this exercise are that AAdvantage really worked for me.

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3 comments
  1. No doubt, it is a short flight. But I was trying to impress Mrs MJonTravel. 🙂 And the J availability, while there, was not quite as pentiful as F….. I was going to need to stay 2 more days…which I would rather have done. But I have some work demands that require me to be back in the US, the Monday after we return.

  2. East Coast – LHR is a pretty short hop to burn 125k. I can suffer business on that route, eg 68k Amex points for VS Upper Class. Just 10k more you could have flown to South Asia CX F…

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