A free tool to help you calculate how many miles you need for an AAdvantage or oneworld award ticket

I always think of Easter Island as being this remote and barely accessible place, when the truth is quite different: oneworld  partner LAN has regularly scheduled service and there’s a decent sized tourism industry based on the island.  Just back from a vacation and unable to face doing anything productive, I was curious as to how may AAdvantage miles would be required for an award ticket and whether a ticket to Easter Island was treated as a single destination award, or if it was treated as a multi-city/single zone award.

An example of a single destination award would be a ticket from Dallas, to Concepcion, Chile with a connection in Santiago.  The amount of miles needed to go from Dallas to Concepcion is the same as the number of miles needed to get from Dallas to Santiago.  A multi-city/single zone award is a ticket issued for travel to two cities within the same destination zone (Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay, and Uruguay make up South America Zone 2). It’s not as good as a single destination award, but it’s a better deal than redeeming mileage for two separate awards.

Anyway, using Google I found a link to a great online tool posted in a dedicated thread on the FlyerTalk forum.  There’s so much information available on FlyerTalk and it amazes me that, even after years of following the threads, I’m always discovering useful information that was posted long ago.

This really useful online tool is called MileageMonkey.  It was developed by Jordan Hargrave, and it calculates the number of miles needed for an AAdvantage or oneworld award ticket.

The number of miles needed to get there is fewer than I expected, and while it turns out that travel to Easter Island is treated as a “wholly within” a single zone award, a round-trip ticket is only 60,000 miles.