Using ITA Matrix to get BA Silver / Oneworld Sapphire in a single trip

Turning Left for Less recently did a couple of excellent articles on using ITA Matrix. I highly recommend reading them first.

https://www.turningleftforless.com/so-you-want-to-book-a-tp-run-ita-matrix-part-1/

https://www.turningleftforless.com/so-you-want-to-book-a-tier-point-run-ita-matrix-part-2/

I decided to construct a flight with the following guidelines in place:

1.) My final destination is Barcelona. Visiting the Sagrada Familia has always been on my bucket list and neither Ashley nor myself have ever been to Spain.

2.) London is a city that we always enjoy visiting, so a stopover in London would be a nice bonus, but not strictly necessary.

3.) We need 4 flights to be on BA / Iberia, to requalify for Silver status.

4.) We need to hit 600+ tier points, again to requalify for Silver status.

5.) Flights from Colombo are generally cheaper, and Sri Lanka has also been on my to-visit list for a while, so I'll be looking at flights from there too.

Using the dates January 17-31 2019 as an example, and inputting PEN-BCN into google flights, we get the following results:

A fairly typical result. A little on the expensive side but not unexpected due to it being the only 1-stop flight between Penang and Barcelona, and in business class.

However, this flight would only get us 560 tier points and none of the 4 required BA flights. It's great if you have no need for the status though.

Since we ARE going for status (and could use a cheaper ticket), I'm going to book PEN-KUL-CMB, followed by CMB-BCN.

PEN-KUL-CMB goes on sale quite often for around RM2,500 on MAS, so we'll just add RM2,500 to the cost of the CMB-BCN flight. It also generates a useful 160 TP.

Inputting in CMB-BCN for the dates 19-29 January 2019 into Google Flights gets you:

Meh. After adding on the additional RM2,500 for the PEN-KUL-CMB flight the total cost is now RM15,750, more than the original flight from Penang, albeit with 160 extra TP. We can do better!

Let's fire up ITA Matrix.

What we are doing here is forcing stops at Doha, London Heathrow and Madrid on the way to Barcelona, as you can get more tier points from multiple medium-haul flights, than a single long haul flight.

And the results:

WOAH. That's a 680 TP run, and all segments are on BA/IB. Although some of the legs are on Qatar Airways (which you want, because the service is much better than BA), because it has a BA code in front, it'll count towards the 4 eligible flights.

And the price? Only RM11,600, add on RM2,500 for the first flight and you have a total of RM14,100, even less than the original PEN-DOH-BCN flight.

Since we'll want to build in stopovers in London, we'll have to go back to the Multi City tool on ITA Matrix and configure the dates manually, which gives us this:

Well that's weird. After building in a stopover in London, the price has now fallen to RM9,993! So the entire flight, PEN-KUL-CMB-DOH-LHR-MAD-BCN return now only costs RM12,500, and it also generates 840 TP.

Isn't that amazing?