I devoted my day to researching and booking for NILE2 and wanted to share some of my finds.

I was able to book a one way United/Lufthansa award through Dulles and Munich to Cairo this morning. We did not have enough UA miles in our accounts, but I was able to transfer our Continental miles instantaneously to United, and also get the remaining miles that we needed by transferring AMEX membership reward points to Continental, and then transfer those over to United.

Later I researched the return since we would really like to take the Royal Jordanian flight from Amman to Chicago and then onwards on AA to New Mexico. I found out that you can book One World partners online with BA (thanks to Peter to pointing out the link for the Points Guy blog who is posting in detail about BA awards.)

Royal Jordanian award seats are available now for booking for the return on 3/24/12. Just like BA opens their award booking earlier than most other airlines, so too apparently does Royal Jordanian. A few weeks from now I will add on the AA flight from Chicago to Albuquerque when that becomes available - there is a charge of $70 for changing the ticket, but I felt that it was worthwhile to lock the flight from Amman in now.

So, those of you who have BA miles can jump on this now - Royal Jordanian also flies to JFK and London. If you don't have enough BA miles, but do have AMEX membership points, those can be transferred instantaneously over to BA.

I must say I feel a bit like I am kiting checks by doing all this transferring, but it worked and we are virtually all set for next year.