Award booking is back on in a big way here at Points, Miles & Martinis. Especially now that Baby Weekly Flyer’s first flight was a success and is no longer a factor. We’ve booked a great set of awards booked together from our monster day of flight award bookings. In addition, we booked a bunch of nice hotels from the monster day of hotel award bookings.
But this award booking is a one of a kind. Sort of a once in a lifetime opportunity to take AAdvantage of when it comes along. The golf gods have smiled upon us and the guys are going on the ultimate golf getaway to Scotland! This is where the game began.
We are so excited to get a chance to visit some of the best golf courses in the world. Here are the courses we get to play.
- St Andrews – The Old Course, the most famous links in all of golf
- Royal Birkdale – A regular host to the British Open
- Royal Lytham & St Annes – Constructed in 1897 and still one of the world’s best links
- St. Andrews – Strathtyrum Course, There is a two course requirement to play the Old Course so this will fulfill the requirement at St. Andrews
- Carnoustie – Championship Course, host to the 2007 Open Championship and rated in the top ten “100 Best Courses Outside the United States†by Golf Digest in 2009
Booking Strategy
Our strategy was to use American Airlines miles to and from Glasgow, Scotland or London and just drive up north. We’d need three tickets in either Business Class or First Class.
The difference between First Class and Business Class is only 12,500 miles per direction. Based on the number of miles we have, we were looking to book First Class on the way to Scotland and then book Business Class on the return. The overnight flight would benefit from First Class while the day time trip back would have Business Class.
The total for the outbound in First Class would be 62,500 miles and the total for the return would be 50,000 miles. So our total journey would run us a total of 112,500 American Airlines miles.
Final Booking
While we could have taken a more direct flight from Orlando to London Gatwick, that flight is operated by British Airways and would cost over $1,000 per person in taxes and fees for business class. So we decided to save a few thousand dollars by adding a few connections to our journey. Alternatively, we could have flown from Chicago or New York direct into Manchester. But those flights are operated by American Airlines internationally configured 757 and didn’t show availability on our dates.
We settled on a booking that looks like the picture below.
Bottom Line
Three award tickets on American Airlines, 337,500 American Airlines miles. A chance to visit a few of the best golf courses in the world to see where golf began, priceless.
Have you ever played any of these courses or visited the area? Would love to hear your thoughts on a trip to Scotland.
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About The Weekly Flyer
The Weekly Flyer writes about travel from a business traveler perspective. He travels the world every week accumulating points and miles along the way.
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Love the post. I’m in the process of planning a similar golf trip to Ireland and Scotland for next summer. I’m trying to figure out the best way to get there from LAX using miles.
Just came back from st Andrews last week. Are you staying at the Old Course Hotel? If not, good luck getting a tee time on the old course. There’s an annual lottery to get a tee time there.
Other than that, nice trip, should be a LOT of fun!!! I was going to post another trip about getting cheap golf in St Andrews, but looks like it’s not longer available.
I’ve played St Andrews. Showed up at 5am for the daily same-day tee time lottery and got lucky, eventually getting out on the course at ~11:30am. As a threesome it would be harder, I was a single. Awesome experience. They were preparing the course for the Open Championship so all the bleachers were up and I could pretend like I was playing in a major.