2 Pax OneWorld or United CHS-DUB

[James from BNA]

2 seats for some friends to meet us in DUB. They have a special needs child and have not taken a vacation in several years. I'm hoping to treat them to Biz seats.

CHS-DUB
October 1-5.
Business Preferred, but will settle for economy.

Ideal landing time DUB-5:05AM to meet us on the AM of Oct 2.
Ideal departure time from DUB 11:45AM to leave close to when we leave
Total duration of flight leg not to exceed 13 hours. They have never flown internationally before.

We are on the non-stop BOS-DUB using the soon to die Avios 25k one way. We would love for them to fly Aer Lingus with us but CHS has pretty limited flights to BOS on points. I can't get the Aer Lingus from BOS-DUB to even show up on United.com even searching segment by segment.

Mile balances
AA 550k
AA 280k
United 57,500
United 57,500
Avios 50k
Avios 50k

I found 90k R/T on AA miles in economy for these times going through Charlotte outbound and Philly coming back but I am reluctant to pay 180k total for economy seats. I missed the US Air and AA wide open Biz space a couple months back.

If I book on AA in economy and biz seats open later, what is the fee to pay the difference in miles?
Should I book these as one ways or round-trips if I settle for the 180K in AA/US economy?

 

[Matt]

UA is being buggy (for a change) I can see saver space on EI108 (Economy) but it only shows up when I swapped the departure airport to ORD...

JFK-DUB = zero
ORD-DUB= ORD-LGA-JFK-DUB



Same thing happens on the way back - there is non stop saver space available in Aer Lingus Economy EI105 to JFK.



So this tells us that we can get them RT from JFK-DUB on Aer Lingus at saver rates.

The CHS leg is ugly... nonstops to JFK are on JetBlue or Delta. They retail RT for about $150.

If you paid cash/traded points into this program then it's likely you'd not have the interline benefits- would have to recheck bags at JFK (I THINK!) and add a bit of stress in there... but its still a lot better value than 90K AA....

 

[Matt]

Actually... it gets weirder.. first it lists a bunch of mixed cabins for JFK -DUB, but then there is an option to fly Biz... so there MAY be Biz space on JFK-DUB!

See option 1 and option 2 below:

 

[BuddyFunJet]

2 seats for some friends to meet us in DUB. They have a special needs child and have not taken a vacation in several years. I'm hoping to treat them to Biz seats.

If I book on AA in economy and biz seats open later, what is the fee to pay the difference in miles?
Should I book these as one ways or round-trips if I settle for the 180K in AA/US economy?

My experience has been that aa waives the change fee to change from y to j, just the miles. Since no stopover issues, one ways make things easier.