THEsocalledfan

Hello all,

Not sure how I possibly missed this living in Sioux Falls, SD, but MSP now has Air France service. However, I can't figure out how to search delta dumb for award availability; it is only showing the delta flight. Tips?

Stubtify

www.alaskaair.com See post #321, explaining the virtues of it for AM, but it also works the same for AF.

Kay_nyc

Searching by schedule for AM flights works for me.

michael_v

DL increased the price of international business awards for travel 6/1/2014 and later and no more holding before ticketing:

http://boardingarea.com/viewfromthew...-class-awards/

From the blog post:

arthurhs

Anyone know why Alaska Air award flights are no longer available (or maybe it's just not findable with the great search tool)?

I used to see AS flights from DCA to LAX, but can't find any for various dates. Was hoping to book a low-tier J/F award ticket from DCA-SYD/BNE/MEL Feb or Mar 2014.

Doublejade

All, I am going to book a LAX-CAN flight on China southern. It's showing J inventory on Airfrance website. But when I called the Delta agent, she tried many ways but could not get it through. She just said they don't have the same inventory on partners as Air France does. Is that true? I used other tools to search for it and the seat is open too.

mnredfox

Did you see post 1?

RealHJ

It shouldn't be true. The agents just may have (purposefully?) been given wrong instructions on how to book CZ flights. Only very, very few (may be less than 1%) know the way to do it (that I believe is undocumented). So is the case not just for CZ but for a number of airlines...varies over time.

DL does this trick often: that is how it keeps the award inventory not overused of partner airlines, by having most of their agents not know how to book it and putting out outright wrong and misleading instructions for their res. agents (or at least, so some of the knowledgeable agents have told me - that if they follow the official memos and instructions, it'll never work, they need to do something entirely different that is undocumented and they are not trained in).

THEsocalledfan

In short, hand up and call back sounds like the advice here.....

THEsocalledfan

Yes, and I very much know how to search award inventory for delta for things that should be on the site. (ie the one way, segment by segment rules)

With that said, after the bump to 125K, I am suddenly seeing a bunch of inventory in June that I did not see before.

mnredfox

Paging help of other FT-ers.

Looking for thoughts on the following trip I want to make in Feb from SFO:

1. Want to go to Sapporo, Japan (CTS) for ~5 days to ski
2. Want to make it out to Lijiang, China (LJG) for some sight seeing ~4 days
3. Want to stop in Shanghai (PVG/SHA) for 3 days
4. Bonus: stop in Tokyo for as long as possible

Goals:
1. Minimum miles
2. All in J (and flat beds, esp the TPAC segment)
3. Minimum YQ (i.e. avoid MU as much as possible)

My initial thoughts are such:
1. SFO-DL-NRT-DL-PVG(SO)-KE-PUS-KE-CTS-KE-ICN-KE-SFO
- I'd like to do a 23 hour layover in NRT, but cannot do on DL metal. Other options are MU but that would incur YQ.
- I'm flying PVG-CTS-ICN-SFO on KE to avoid MU (YQ)
- I'm pretty sure I can make this work without hitting MPM issues (did last year)

2. Buy second intra-China ticket on CZ (again avoid MU due to YQ):
PVG-CZ-KMG (SO)-LJG-KMG-PVG
- KMG layover keeps overall mileage to less than 3K km, so should be medium level for SM redemption
- Better to do in J, as RT is 35K vs 25K
- Cost using $$ is approx $300 or more for Y fare

Thoughts? Pretty sure cannot do this on 1 low 120K RT (MPM, multiple stopovers etc). Also, haven't found a way to get a SO in NRT either without flying MU. Also, what are the planes I have to fly on the partners to hit the flatbeds (at least TPAC), I'm thinking:

DL: 76W (SFO-NRT) and 77L (NRT-PVG)
MU: A332 (SFO-PVG)
CZ: NA
KE: 772 (SFO-ICN, looks like is V2 of the plane that has flat bed vs lie flat) and A388 (ICN-LAX), so would fly ICN-LAX-SFO at the end. Is it worth the extra LAX-SFO leg to fly on the A338 on KE vs their 772? See this link.

Intra-China flights SHA/PVG-KMG-LJG seem to be either 737's or A319's, so don't need flatbed

RealHJ

This will have to be two, possibly three award tickets. However, I suggest put as many flights as you can (up to 8 max that DL can price out) on one PNR, as sometimes DL will price things out in a better and more favourable way than you could even think of (e.g. it may have the destination be your stopover and then you go to stopover and back through destination return (backtracking), and/or only count one shortest/lowest mileage flight as a separate award, or something else like that, that actually will result in less miles than a "logical" pricing should/would).

mnredfox

Looks like two. Booked a non-ideal ticket (hope more avail opens up on better days), but so far looks like this:

SFO-KE-ICN-KE-CTS-KE-ICN-KE-PVG-DL-NRT-DL-SFO for 120K and around $120.

Will book the China portion shortly.

Travelomania

Anyone have positive results using SM's on Hawaiian from HNL to AKL ?

mnredfox

DL breaks down intra-China miles as such:

Miles shown are each way based on round-trip purchase.
*Short haul is 1-800 km.
**Med haul is 800-3,000 km.
***Long haul is 3,000-5,000 km.

Where:
Short haul Y/J is 6K/7.5K OW
Med haul Y/J is 15/17.5K
Long haul Y/J is 30/45K

Question, does anyone how this is calculated?

Say I fly PVG-XXX-YYY, is the distance calculated as the sum of PVG-XXX plus XXX-YYY, or PVG-YYY?