Questions and Answers

What FF program would be best/quickest to reach One World Sapphire status. I’m mainly looking for Admirals Club Access and after the devalue announcement I’ve been shoveling all my American flights onto Alaska. A decent award chart from US to Europe would be nice as well. I mainly travel international, business class.

[USER=70]@Chris[/USER]–the two might be mutually incongruous unfortunately. I think the general consensus is that it is easy to reach BA gold which will give you the status (as long as you can get the BA segments) but the award chart is painful.

[USER=70]@Chris[/USER]

Gaurav sums it up quite nicely.

From a older post I wrote to a EU based member asking something similar:

Well the easiest to get Oneworld Emerald on is probably BA.

This article cover almost every thing you want to know about BA Executive Club.
[URL]http://www.loungebuddy.com/british-airways-executive-club-the-ultimate-guide/[/URL]

But as you can see it has it’s downsides;

Since each segment is in practice a separate award when it comes to cost of Avios it can add up fast if you don’t live in a Oneworld hub or is flying to one.

BA charges high fees for long haul award redemption’s, which can make an award very expensive.

You need to fly 4 segments on BA each year, but EU short haul is OK.

There are however some upside as well;
Avios are very good for short haul awards

Avios can be good value for upgrades on BA
[URL]http://onemileatatime.boardingarea.com/2015/09/20/upgrade-british-airways-avios/[/URL]

As I said to begin with, top status on Oneworld is easy to get on BA, you need 1500 Tier points.

In J you earned 40 Tier points for flight up to 2K miles, 140 Tier points for over 2K miles and 160 Tier points for over 6K miles. This mean that say FRA-DOH-HKG R/T would earn 560 Tier points, add 4 BA economy segments in Europe and you would be OW Sapphire.

Here is a very useful site for finding out how many Tier Points and Avios you will earn on Oneworld carriers.
[URL]http://www.owenrudge.net/utils/bacalc/[/URL]

AA is for the moment the best for earning and redeeming miles, problem is that are going to be a devaluation of the program in March and for their own flights they are going revenue based earning in the second half of the year.
[URL]http://onemileatatime.boardingarea.com/2015/11/17/2016-aadvantage-program-details/[/URL]

Another problem is that AA has not given a clear answer to what earning rates are going to be on other Oneworld carriers
From AA website:
Earning award miles for travel on most flights marketed by partner airlines will be based on a percentage of the flight distance and the fare class purchased. Exact calculations will be available in the future.
[URL]https://www.aa.com/i18n/AAdvantage/programDetails/AAdvantage2016.jsp[/URL]

AA has the same requirement as BA, 4 segments flown on their flights. Which might be a bit hard if you don’t visit the US.

Oh yeah, BA gold. Simple itinerary to get to BA Gold, takes 2 days. Costs $1,700 plus