Questions and Answers

Given the latest devaluations, I am still wondering if I should switch to AA oder BA. I don’t have access to American CC, so would stay with the bad earning rates in AA later this year revenue-based. On BA I would earn much more avois however for award redemption Europe-US or US-Asia it’s not really offering good options (this award chart is just insane, right? plus fuel & taxes…).
So buying additional miles would probably on both programs be important to me. I have read that I can only buy 35K avois/year on BA – does that include the avois & cash options, where I can reduce the number of avoids needed for the award by buying up with some extra cash? Or will this option exist in addition?

Any other suggestion how to decide which program to choose? I am flying mainly to the US and Asia out of Europe plus some leisure trips to Maldives etc., always business class, so status is not so relevant for me. Only very few intra-Europe flights (often for repositioning for the longer trips). So my criteria is collecting miles for long-distance awards. My main program is/was Lufthansa M&M but I end up buying more and more tickets on AA and Qatar. Help!

[USER=897]@Samoa[/USER] if you always fly paid J, I’d think AA would be a good fit for you based on revenue. Why do you think it would be a bad earning rate?

I usually try to snag discounted business rates. On revenue, the miles would go down to about 1/3 compared to today (miles will be calculated on the rate without taxes, fuel etc to calculate- this can be as low as 1’000 dollars if you are lucky). On the recent great fares to SFO I get about 17k miles but only 4’500 later this year. With about 5000-6000 miles per round trip I have to fly for decades until I have enough for a nice business or first class award (return) … 🙂

Ah, that makes sense although I was under the impression that you would earn miles on all payments other than taxes (including fuel/other surcharges). I would double check that.

[USER=897]@Samoa[/USER]

Being EU based do you fly much on AA?

Because earning rates on partner airlines have not yet been published by AA
From the AA 2016 program page.
[URL]http://www.aa.com/i18n/AAdvantage/programDetails/AAdvantage2016.jsp[/URL]

“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.”

I have no idea what the earning rates will be, but historically AA have put all partner business in the same group. But it will not be miles/U.S. dollar since AA don’t have access to what you paid for a ticket to MLE on BA or QR

AA’s 777-300 is one of the nicest ways to get to the US, however it’s difficult to predict how often I will be on AA or partners. Currently it’s for most partners 125% of miles in business. I wasn’t aware that this might change, too

[USER=897]@Samoa[/USER]

See what you mean about the AA 77W.

I have been looking for information about max avios&cash a year that you asked about, but have not found anything. Well except that it’s considered bad value for J awards.
[URL]http://millionmilesecrets.com/2015/01/26/book-british-airways-award-flights-like-a-pro-part-6-cash-and-points/[/URL]

But, did you know that there are other ways to buy avios to get around the 35K limit? And that you can buy 100K avios per year on Iberia?
[URL]http://www.headforpoints.com/2015/09/14/what-is-the-cheapest-way-to-buy-avios-points/[/URL]
[URL]https://www.iberia.com/ibcomv3/content/ibplus/pdf/ibplus_tabla_avios_compra_en.pdf[/URL]

My advise to you would be to ride out the storm so to speak, while AA devaluation is coming soon it will after all be later in the year before they go revenue-based.

Just how high a percentage a year of your flights each year are AA anyway?