Welcome to Flyertalk!
My wife and I finally both have over 40,000 miles a piece on Northwest and we are looking at booking our first award travel reservation.
Congrats!
We are wanting to go to Hawaii in the fall of 2009 sometime on perksaver tickets. Probably try and do a multi-city routing...flying into Kauai (LIH) and flying back out of Kona (KOA). Then arranging and paying for an inter-island flight during our time there. Availability seems very very limited, but we are very flexible as to the days that we travel.
Just remember that to fly from LIH to KOA, interisland carriers generally charge for two legs, since you almost have to take two flights (stopping over in HNL).
Return flights seem to be harder to find than the outgoing flight.
Anyone have any tips on searching to find available tickets?
Patience, check every day, and be creative.
Is it better to book by calling Northwest and paying the booking fees?
If you can call NW for the routing available, then you can try to duplicate that routing on nwa.com and book there to avoid the fees. If not, just call back and pay the fees.
From your experiences...is there any chance that more perksaver awards will open up or is it better to book as soon as we can?
More Perksavers will open up closer to departure, so it's best to check frequently. There's no rhyme or rhythm to when they start opening.
From what I can tell on January 15, 2009 Hawaii perksaver reward flights will go from 35,000 miles to 40,000 miles, but that is the only change. Is there anything else different about the new layout that I am missing that would affect us?
Yes. It's a three tiered structure as opposed to the current two tier structure. So there'll likely be less availability at the 40k level and more at the higher levels. You'd be best to book before mid-January when the new redemption levels take place.
Thanks in advance for your help and for any tips you can give a newbie...
Can you earn 30k more miles and fly up front?