Originally Posted by
ynewman
First pick your desired carrier.
Then identify its mega fortress hub (e.g. AA - DFW, DL - SLC). Find a small city served *only* by your carrier's affiliate airline. That'll likely be a small regional airport near that megahub. For example, only AA serves GGG.
Finally, look for a business class tix from a big business-traveler city (e.g. JFK) to your small city. JFK-GGG should work.
In most cases that will be enough. If it's not, pick travel dates on Monday where the outbound is less than 7 days out, which will force the outbound to price in J or F. The inbound should be further enough out to be in I, which will make the ticket non-refundable.
Good luck!
{reposted from November post in Airline Redemption thread.}
http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/other...=#post10632706
Two Tips to $2700
I found two tips to pass along from my recent redemption search:
1. Use Kayak.com for the initial search
Use Kayak as you normally would to locate your flight. You may select Business class and a preferred airline. On the results page you have multiple options to limit your search by date, time of day, nearby airports. One of these limiting factors is price. You may have to click on the arrow to expand it. Once you do you'll receive a little slide bar with prices. Just slide it to the left till you hit $2800 or so, sort your prices highest to lowest and, as my Aussie friends say, Bob's your uncle.
2. Expedia limits the displayed flights by time
Once you find your flight on Kayak it may be difficult to find it again on Expedia in order to ensure it's availability at ThankYou. Expedia does not display all options - as Kayak does - when you search. I found it helpful to match up my departure times in order for Expedia to show me the flight I'd already found on Kayak.
If the departure is 8:30 AM leaving and 7:30 PM returning set your departing time to 8AM and returning departure to 7PM and Expedia is more likely to reveal your flight. Alternatively setting the departure times to Morning or Afternoon also reveals many more flights.
Expedia is consumer friendly in showing the lowest fares but of course for our purpose that is counter-intuitive to our goals.
Hope this helps. Thanks for all the help of those that came to my aid.