My bags are packed and I'm ready to go

(OK, so my bags aren't really packed, and I've got lots of work to do before I'm ready to go, but ... actually come to think of it, that's a ridiculous title for this post. Never mind - back to the saga from my most recent post.)

In the mean time I had been sorting out my itinerary for the rest of the trip. One thing I needed to ensure was that my travels this year would allow me to requalify for Executive Platinum status in the American Airlines AAdvantage frequent flyer program. Usually two RTWs in Business would do that nicely, but because the award tickets to Colombo do not accumulate frequent flyer miles, I looked like being a few thousand miles short. Business Class flights earn 1.5 points towards status requalification per actual mile flown, so with two RTWs you need to average 33,334 miles on each RTW to get the required 100,000 points for Executive Platinum.

Fortunately my one free weekend will be during the UK leg of my trip, and there is a well-documented long flight which falls within the airfare rules. So on the Saturday I am flying from Heathrow to Dubai, then getting back on the same plane and returning to London. I also routed my London to Washington DC flight via Los Angeles (!) which is also allowed. Checking the mileage on the Great Circle Mapper we find that the flights end up totalling 33,114 miles. OK, so it's 220 miles short of requirements, but since each flight earns a minimum of 500 elite qualifying points, it's fine - a single domestic flight will fix the problem. The whole trip, including the non-earning segments totals just over 40,000 miles, or 64,000 km.

I hope to be able to blog the progress of my adventure as it happens - it all starts this Saturday.