Friday, 26 June 2009 – Tuesday, 7 July 2009 (San Francisco to Beijing via the Atlantic)

We have been traveling to Europe during winter for the past couple years to take advantage of the low fare and rack up some mileage. But one of the main drawback is the cold and gloomy weather. When United raised the mileage requirement end of last year, we decided to burn some miles to see Europe in the summer. It would cost 80000 miles for a round trip ticket on business class to go to Europe, and 90000 miles to go to Asia. But one can also choose to go to North Asia via Europe and pay 105000 miles – the higher of the North America/Europe (80000) and Europe/North Asia mileage (105000) required. This seems to be much better value.

So we first decided on two cities, one in Europe and one in Asia. We would like to visit Krakow Poland and Sapporo Hokkaido Japan. We used the ANA tool extensively to look for availability and possible routings from San Francisco. Booking the tickets took huge amount of patience, as any Flyertalkers can imagine. First agent said United does not fly to Krakow and so I could not redeem award tickets, couple other agents said these required two separate awards. Not deterred by all these, I used the hang up and call back approach, and on one occasion I let the agent make a booking that’s something totally not what I wanted, it’s pointless to argue with him and instead just to let him book and thank him and let the booking expire after 72 hours. There are some good agents though, those must be from the HNL call center, and they are willing to do the research if I asked them on something they are not sure instead of starting to make up their own rules and define their valid routings. Still, I could not get anything book to Sapporo, we could go as far as Tokyo, and after couple more calls we decided to change the destination to Beijing. The 1K award change fee waiver is such a blessing, as we have made about half a dozen changes that required reissuing the tickets, and this would have cost over a thousand dollars ($100 to $150 per ticket per change).

Just when we thought in March we had the perfect trip booked for the Memorial Day week, United came up with the Double EQM promotion. Oh, we have to take advantage of that! So we bought the tickets to Moscow for the Memorial Day weekend, and changed the award booking to the July 4 week, but had to settle for some Economy segments and some less than optimal routings. Then came the hard work to keep monitoring the ANA tool and calling United to improve on the routing and schedule, and finally we got the following :

Awards : 105,000 miles North America to North Asia via Atlantic Business Class

Itinerary : Here’s the ticketed itinerary.
Fri Jun 26 UA 34 SFO 10:20pm JFK 6:59am (+1)
Sat Jun 27 LOT 16 EWR 11:25pm WAW 1:55pm (+1)
Sun Jun 28 LOT 3901 WAW 3:55pm KRK 4:45pm
Wed Jul 1 LH 3335 KRK 5:00pm MUC 6:25pm
Wed Jul 1 LH 722 MUC 7:40pm PEK 11:20am (+1)
Sun Jul 5 CA 834 PEK 1:55pm PVG 4:05pm
Mon Jul 6 LH 729 PVG 1:15pm FRA 6:55pm
Mon Jul 6 LH 982 FRA 8:30pm MUC 9:25pm
Tue Jul 7 UA 907 MUC 12:35pm SFO 3:01pm
Tue Jul 7 UA 907 ORD 5:25pm SFO 8:06pm


Ticketed route : 24971 miles

We think this is as good as we can get. We would have liked to get the direct flight from Munich to San Francisco on Lufthansa on the last segment, as the flight leaves later in the afternoon and still arrives home earlier than the United flight through Chicago, and that would allow more time for us to explore Munich. But Starnet blocking prevented all that Lufthansa had opened up the availability about two weeks prior to the flight date, but United could not see a thing and all the daily calling was fruitless.

Still, we are pretty happy with the results. While Beijing is the destination and Krakow is the stopover, we managed to also route through and spend a day in New York, and overnight in Shanghai and Munich for some bonus side trips using the 24 hour transit rule.