salvadors

Thanks - that's very useful. I was wondering where the best base in SE Asia might be to do something like this, and that's looking pretty good. My primary destination (in terms of being both where I'll be staying the longest, and the furthest away) though is NZ. Most of what I'm doing is looking for interesting ways of breaking up the trips there and back. But I do plan to stop off on the way for a couple of months and travel around like that.

I actually wrote a little program to analyse the mileage redemption chart to look for routes that could be flown for around the same price by going via another zone. I was surprised to find three that are *cheaper* doing that (the well known 1-8 via 2, but also 2-7 via 10, and 3-6 via 1), but pleased that there are 16 different routes where it comes out the same (e.g. 2-9 is 100, but 2-8-9 is 50+50, thus allowing a 'free' destination of, for example, Tokyo or Seoul on the way to and/or from Aus/NZ, plus, of course, an extra stopover. (And this is doubly useful to me as I'm actually based in Zone 2, rather than Zone 1, so don't even need a positioning flight.)

So the simple expansion of a 2-9 return is a set of 2-8, 8-9, 9-8, 8-2 singles, giving 3 destinations and 4 stop-overs, vs the 1 destination/1 stop-over of the naive booking for the same price.

On the simple version I listed, I'm not even doing all that, I'm just going 2-9-8-2. But now I'm thinking that I may as well take an extra 8 on the outward, as it would allow me to position better in a 7 stopover or get an extra couple of free Asian cities saving even a couple of cheap AirAsia flights

Is what I'm describing actually unrealistic? I don't want to waste a lot of time on this if it's very unlikely it'd actually get booked!

Thanks.