Originally Posted by
ufris
My wife and I are planning a trip for next summer to Taiwan (to visit family), and then to Thailand and Vietnam. We live in the Philadelphia area, but could relatively easily go to the DC or NYC airports if it made sense. The goal is to spend a week in Taipei and then 3 weeks traveling around Thailand and Vietnam (and possibly Laos and Cambodia).
We don't fly a lot, but between credit card bonuses and a few flights, we have 230k BA miles and 100k AA miles. We'd love to use these for the trip, but I realize that not all legs would necessarily be covered.
So how should I go about this? I'm a newbie when it comes to OW and booking flights internationally. Any wisdom would be very much appreciated. Thanks in advance.
Your BA miles would almost get you 2 x round-trip economy flights from PHL (or DC or NY) to Hong Kong or Bangkok - you need 120k each for a full redemption but you could use a miles + cash option = 1 x redemption @120k miles plus 1 redemption @96k miles + $255 cash. There are other miles + cash options if you wanted to say use premium economy - e.g. 108k miles + $775 each. Personally, I'd shudder at the idea of flying PHL-LHR-HKG in Y and would do Premium Economy at a minimum, but depends on whether $775 is a lot of money to you. Bear in mind that there will be taxes on top of this for either a miles or a miles + cash redemption.
From HK, you have access to CX's network for Taiwan, Thailand and Vietnam which you could use AA miles for at least part of that. If you structured it right, you could do something like HKG-TPE-(HKG)-SGN all on CX and then get a cheap one-way fare to BKK from SGN and fly back to the US ex-BKK (i.e. PHL-LHR-HKG (open-jaw) BKK-LHR-PHL). Air Asia flies SGN-BKK for about USD65 one-way incl taxes if booked far enough in advance.