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Answers (3)

65K AA Miles?

65K AA Miles?

  1. MrsWright New Member

    Hello Lucky,
    After reading your blog, II took advantage of Citi’s AA card promotion offering 50K miles earlier this year. I currently have 65K AA miles and would love to use this toward a European honeymoon sometime this year.

    A few questions:
    Is this amount enough to award my husband and I first class seats from JFK to Heathrow. If not, how can I work the system?

    Is now it a good time to buy more AA miles with cash? If so, what’s a good number of miles that I would want to bank to be able to have more flexibility while traveling.

    And lastly, would love to somehow use my miles to get to Thailand. Any advice for that?

  2. Gaurav Community Ambassador

    [USER=1929]@MrsWright[/USER], welcome. The AA award chart is located at [URL]https://www.aa.com/i18n/AAdvantage/redeemMiles/american-airlines-award-chart2016.jsp[/URL] and allows you to easily look up the cost for tickets to various destinations. AA has a zone based chart so any destination or origin within the designated regions costs the same number of miles. You’ll see that a first class ticket to Europe is 85,000 miles so unfortunately you will need more.

    Ben’s article here will give you a good overview of the routing rules involved in booking flights with AA miles:
    [URL]http://onemileatatime.boardingarea.com/2014/06/08/american-aadvantage-award-routing-rules/[/URL]

    Ben periodically posts details of any sales that AA is running along with historical pricing data. Here is the current sale: [URL]http://onemileatatime.boardingarea.com/2016/05/04/buy-american-mile/[/URL]. You’ll have to decide if the costs are worth it to you. You (and your fiance) could also apply for other AA branded credit cards to earn miles. In addition consider getting the SPG card which can transfer points to the AAdvantage program at a rate of 20,000 SPG points to 25,000 AA miles when you transfer in increments of 20,000. This is also a better fit for earning AA miles for daily spend since you end up earning 1.25 AA miles instead of 1mile on the Citi AA card.

  3. David W Community Ambassador

    US to Europe requires 85k miles each way in First. 57.5k is needed for Business. Round trip for 2 passengers comes out to 340k miles for First or 230k for Business. Personally, JFK-LHR isn’t that long of a flight. AA award space is hard to come by, and F is only on their 77W and while it’s not bad, I wouldnt consider it the most aspiration of uses. I’d rather save miles and try to find award seats in Business on their 77W aircraft. British Airways is also an option but their business product is 8 across, and there are fuel surcharges that come with the award. First will be better, but again its a short flight where I dont think it’s the most aspiration of uses.

    Buying miles is a great option if you have a plan for them. However, the current promotion is a discount on purchased miles. I would rather buy when there is a bonus offered on a miles purchase. The highest I’ve seen is buying 150k miles with an additional 115k bonus.

    Lastly, AA charges 70k each way per person in business class for US-Thailand and 110k for first. You’d be able to fly on a variety of oneworld airline partners, as long as there is availability. The most popular options are Cathay Pacific or Japan Airlines.

    Do you have any miles or points currencies? If you’re able to share some more information, we can try to piece something together that could work or offer next steps so that you can book these trips.

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