Always keen for an adventure, when one of my friends suggested a trip to Las Vegas in the Easter holidays, I was bound to say yes. I had visited the city last summer with her on what was my first ‘tier point run’ and my first ex-EU.

On that trip, I flew DUB-LHR-JFK-LAX-LAS-MIA-JFK-LCY-DUB. It was brilliant – I flew First to New York on BA and on the new A321T transcontinental, as well as the BabyBus – BA’s business class only plane which flies into London City. From that trip I earned my Silver card and definitely became hooked!

That trip was my main summer holiday on my own and paid for by the additional work I do marking exams – it allows me to afford to splash out on things that I couldn’t normally justify. 

On this occasion, however, I have  chosen a slightly different route. I was contained by dates, as I need to be in the UK on the evening of the 8th April and my friend had already booked their tickets so there was very little flexibility. This is bad news when it comes to taking advantage of cheap premium fares. For example, departing on the 10th meant fares started at around £2275, but that lost a day of holiday – bring it forward a day and the price jumped £500.

I therefore looked at the cost of going in economy and was surprised at how cheap it was. I played around with various starting points, as discussed here, and found that Copenhagen would be the cheapest starting point again.

Initially I though that I would fly out to Copenhagen on the Sunday and back, stay at home in London and make my way to Las Vegas on the Monday, but this would have meant only two full days with my friend.

I followed this up by looking at doing the ‘Copenhagen Shuffle’ on the Saturday Morning and flying out from Heathrow less than 24 layers to avoid stop over fees. It was on this trip that I found the best price of around 3350DKK. I was able to take off 1787DKK with 35,000 Avios making the total equivalent to a staggeringly small £180 cash outlay.

However, I need to be in Wakefield on the evening of the 8th, the option above would require me to book a separate, non-protected connection, go into central London and take the train or drive 3hours each way – none of which struck me as particularly sensible. What I really needed was to route via Manchester on the same ticket to ensure that my connections were protected.

I used the multi-city tool on BA.com to find a CPH-MAN on the Saturday, MAN-LAS on the Sunday and the return the following weekend.

My biggest gripe about this part of the website is that it gives you loads of options but no prices until you have clicked through to the end, so it’s very slow.

However, I was able to come up with a route that worked on price as well as timings. CPH-LHR-MAN-PHL-LAS-JFK-LHR-CPH for 4206DKK, or £484. I used 35,000 Avios to take off 1787DKK which took the price down to £285 which is an incredible price, considering that the LHR-MAN flights I would need to have bought anyway would be £110.

I will look in another post at whether this was a good use of Avios for me.