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.
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.
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…
I like AAdvantage too!