What are some good airline / frequent flyer program options to use for Dubai to Europe?

Hi all

Firstly, thanks to the superb advice on this site (and a few others) I booked the F apartments from MEL-AUH on the Etihad A380 for 60,000 AA points each. Absolutely excellent value at a quarter of the retail price.

Now, I want to get to Europe from there and I figured I’d spend a couple of days in Dubai first (does anyone know if the EY complimentary chauffer service allow transfer from Abu Dhabi to Dubai?) and then fly out of DXB. Does anyone have any creative suggestions using frequent flyer points? I’m flexible on airlines dates.

So far I’ve looked at:

  1. Emirates - using QF points - 50,000 for J and 75,000 for F.
  2. BA - using AA points - 40,000
What I'd love to do is Air France or Lufthansa but Michael Kao scared me off AF and LH seems to have odd availability on Life Miles. What about Korean Air's FFP? Can I transfer SPG points to that program and leverage into Skyteam?

As always, I look forward to your comments.

LLO

Anywhere specific in Europe you are aiming for?

Need to end up in London eventually, but hoping to go via Copenhagen.

Sorry to scare you off. I was shocked too when I read that article. \r\n\r\nTo go to LHR another one you can try using AA is our very own Qantas, which has an excellent F product. Availability between DXB to LHR is probably the best you can get on Qantas F. You also get to enjoy EK lounge in DXB. \r\n\r\nIf you are thinking of going through CPH, I don’t think there is any FFP that I can think of that will allow you to have a stopover in CPH and then onto LHR. So you will most likely need 2 tickets. What you can do with your point is using QF points on EK flight to CPH and then get a cheap revenue ticket to London in Y. (Intra Europe J is same seat as Y with middle row blocked. So not worth paying J for).\r\n\r\nI’m not sure about Korean air’s redemption rate on partner’s airlines. (Just google!) As Korean mile is not an easy currency to earn in Australia, I can’t really help you there. May be someone else here can. But from what I’ve read, to redeem on Korean is not simple, you need to fill out an application form for award seats. (And it’s not called award seat. It’s called bonus seat!)\r\n\r\nI assume you have citiprestige card as you were inquiring about AF. Citiprestige can be converted to Delta’s skymiles so you do have access to Skyteam, no need to go through Korean, unless you were planning to use Korean miles to redeem AF first, as Korean is the only sky team member that allows F redemption. Again, I’m not familiar with Korean so I can’t tell you how easy it is to redeem AF F class. But consider that it’s not accessible to their own Flying Blue non elite members, I doubt you can get it via partner’s program. Happy to be proven wrong though!

does anyone know if the EY complimentary chauffer service allow transfer from Abu Dhabi to Dubai
Yes it's possible according to what I have read...