codykmiller

Hello,

My wife and are planning an 8 1/2 month trip starting in Nov 2016 and are looking for some help/advice in utilizing various miles. Currently, we have approximately 120k UR, 55k TU, and 110k AA. Depending on card offers, we may be able to accrue another 50k AA and/or 60k UR. I know we will eventually run out of miles but would like to use these as efficiently as possible.

Our itinerary and tentative use of miles is as follows:
RDU -> Spain/France - 22.5k AA miles pp
Spain/France -> S. Africa - 25k UR pp via Singapore Air
S. Africa -> AU/NZ - 35k UR pp via Singapore Air
AU/NZ -> Bali - 25k TU pp via Qantas
Bali -> Thailand
Thailand -> Japan
Japan -> Egypt - 22.5k AA miles pp
Egypt -> Europe*
Europe* -> Florida
*We will be in Europe for ~3 months and can fly our of anywhere

At this point, we don't really have any desire to fly business/first as we want to take as many award flights as possible. As we're both pretty new to award flights, i just don't know if this is the best use of our current points/miles.

Any help is greatly appreciated.

Thunderroad

Sounds like a fun trip! I'm afraid I don't have any great advice on how to maximize miles usage on such a trip.

What I would advise, though, is to simply grab those mileage tickets that are available now for the longest and presumably most $$$ expensive legs. You might have a bit of time for economy tix, but award ticket availability does disappear, sometimes months in advance.

In contrast, simply be prepared to buy relatively inexpensive tickets for relatively short hops, certainly Thailand to Bali and presumably Egypt to Europe.

Hope it all works out!

Mwenenzi

codykmiller Welcome to FT

Have you checked award availability on the dates you require? Or is this only a wish list of flights with ff miles you hope to get. I suspect reality will be very different.

http://www.awardace.com/redemptions/...p_type=one_way

Duke787

I would consider UA for the US - Europe - US portion and then leverage it to take advantage of the 2 OJs and stopover permitted.

It'll be 60k a person and you could do something like:

RDU - EWR - CDG (stopover)

Europe* (wherever you re-enter from Egypt/OJ #1) - Europe destination of your choosing (destination) - Florida (OJ #2)

You could also utilize this to hit both Europe and Asia on the same award and nest some other things.

For example:

RDU - EWR - CDG (stopover)
CDG - BKK - DPS (destination)
BKK (OJ #1) - LHR - Florida (OJ #2)

That would be 80k UA/person and for that you would get CDG, DPS (Bali), and Bangkok off the list. You could use cheap Asian carries (Scoot, AirAsia, etc.) or miles to go DPS to Japan and then down to Bangkok to catch the return UA leg.

Check out this thread for detailed information on stopovers/OJs on UA.

http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/unite...2016-a-13.html

Especially in Y since the mileage is the same on UA or *A partners, you should have no problem using UA miles and it's a very good use of UR if you are able to take advantage of the OJs and stopover.

Now one thing you could also do is try and nest in your trip down to South Africa. So for example at your CDG stopover on the UA award, you could look to use AA for CDG - DOH - JNB/CPT on QR for 30k/person.

Evenstar22

I don't get cc miles, but that point usage looks way, way too low.
In my experience, award flights that are long haul usually start at 40k miles, and not much lower unless you're lucky.