I was looking at potential miles opportunities for people in the UK who may wish to use Avios to visit Australia for birding. The high taxes from the UK make an Avios redemption in economy a bad choice.

Since I strongly recommend arriving a couple days in advance to get over the jet lag, I looked at a departure on Sunday, 9 Feb to Perth, returning on 28 Feb as an example.

With Avios, it costs at least 100,000 Avios plus $757 in taxes with options to spend more money and less Avios.

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If you have American Airlines miles, this itinerary would cost 90,000 miles and the taxes would probably be closer to the Cathay Pacific taxes from their website.  I can’t look at it online since AA doesn’t support online partner redemptions with CX.   If you use AA miles to redeem on BA, they do pass along the fuel surcharges so not a great idea!

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To simply buy the ticket from Cathay Pacific, it costs (in GBP) the equivalent of $1275 and you will earn miles for your choice of One-World programs.

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I would definitely NOT use Avios for this itinerary.  I wouldn’t use AA to travel on BA/QF because I think 90,000 AAdvantage miles are worth more than $550;  but I would call AA to find out how much they would charge for the CX itinerary.

Traveling in business or first class is a better use of Avios/AAdvantage miles but when I checked, it wasn’t available.

I do think that this itinerary is one you are better off paying for with money unless you are swimming in miles.