I'm relatively new to the whole idea of mileage running, I don't typically travel a ton (normally 10-20k miles/yr) and my dominant theme has been price. In my circle of friends I'm the one who gets the good deals on flights. I'm at 25k this year, have 3 weeks off (Dec) and want to get 35k status. The caveat being I actually want to see things, and don't want to pay extra simply to fly star alliance and get miles. IMO there's no point to pay an extra $500 to get MLL access which costs $400.

Due to a new job, I'll get 4-5 sets of 3 weeks off each year, based out of Indonesia, along with a travel allowance of $7100, and I want to make the most of it, along with have status in various ff programs. I guess my intention is dual purpose. I want to travel with a relatively low cpm, (<10), but the primary purpose of trips will be for travel, If I spend 8+ hours on a plane, I want to spend at least a week in a place.

Due to my somewhat limited travels (maybe 1-2 big non-work trips a year), normally I due quite a bit of research into flights, and have a pretty firm idea of my destinations.

My typical process is this: go to Expedia, look at a few different return/open jaw trips. Any good deals I see I'll go to the airline website and compare prices. Then I adjust.

*THIS* is my most time consuming process. Lets say I want to go to Auckland. I may search CGK-AKL as a base to get a ballpark. Then I may try to CHC or WLG to see how that affects the price. Then maybe open jaw CGK-HKG-AKL/CHC/WLG, then maybe full round trip CGK-HKG-AKL-CGK, Right now CGK-MUC-AKL can be had for $1500, lots of miles, two interesting places, but I have to get home. CGK-MUC-AKL-BNE (to get closer home) is $6k. If you separate that into CGK-MUC-AKL and AKL-BNE as two itineraries it becomes $1500 + $200 for the same flights. Then still need to figure BNE-CGK.

Then on top of this you can play with the dates and intermediate airports, MUC could be FRA. Additionally I'm not committed to CGK as a departure, my closest airport is actually PKU (work just flies us to CGK/SIN/KUL as a courtesy), so that further complicates the potential deals.

There are literally millions of combinations. In liberal terms I guess my search is From SIN/CGK/KUL to somewhere with stuff to do 4-10k miles away, then another fun city in roughly the backwards location, finally back to SIN/CGK/KUL. I'm open to having multiple itineraries, don't really care where I go. Would prefer mostly star alliance. My question is "How do you efficiently do this?!?!" Every time I do a multiple location search on Expedia you need to retype airports and dates. Yah it only take seconds, but it triples the time and when you search 1000 itineraries that's a lot. Whats the best way to find the cheapest flights? I also find I'm stuck to things like expedia, because most airline sites can't handle the multi-leg multi carrier itineraries.

Is there any completely versatile software out there that can say sort of do like farecompare but with int'l airports, and one degree further with two or three leg open jaws?

I guess the dream software would do this:

1) Look at all outgoing one ways for day(s) of departure, and all incoming one ways for day(s) of return. Identify any "deals"

2) On top of that it will search for 2-3 leg open jaws between departure city, return city, and any city identified in step 1.

3) in addition to open jaws it would look at any flights that require a transfer, and compare the price from one flight with a transfer, to two seperate flights on one itinerary.

Thanks for the help, sorry if its a bit long...