Originally Posted by
antispin
First, thanks for all the replies -- I really appreciate it!
Going in F or J is not an option -- F is now 125,000 points for Asia 1, almost twice as many as Y. I barely have half the points for Y. Virtually all of the points are from credit cards and I've pretty much milked that route to death.
I think dropping the AC segments to save money is a great idea -- the only place I absolutely need to go from YOW is NCE. But how can I minimize the taxes and fees? And can I avoid going through the U.S. -- I can't imagine going through Homeland Security with a 2 year old boy and a non-Canadian (who would need a visa) >_<
(all of you in F should thank us for not getting him a seat there)
Anyways... all I *really* need to do is YOW-NCE-ICN-YOW over two months (July-Aug 2012). Everything else is gravy. From a purely dollars-and-cents point of view, do you think it will be cheaper to do this as a miniRTW in Y than to try and buy tickets? And save the points for rewards in F another year?
From the purely mathematical point of view, you are probably going to earn somewhere in the neighbourhood of 10-15K miles (non AC airlines will not likely give 100%) if you pay for the ticket yourself. The amount you would pay for the top-up miles + fuel surcharge makes it a pretty close decision - now I can sympathize with not wanting to shell out thousands of dollars when you have all these miles, but saving a bit more would get you a much nicer trip later on...provided you could save enough before the 7 year expiry.