Originally Posted by
SEA1K4EVR
The only difference is the cost (half the miles) and they are much more capacity controlled. You can often get saver awards with good routings as well. Once confirmed, there is no difference..it's highly unlikely you'd ever be downgraded.
Round trip awards (saver or standard) do allow a stopover so yes you could.
A note for the future.. when posting a question like this please just use the city name where you're going. When you only post the airport code most people have to take the time to look it up. And it's doubly bad when you use the wrong airport code
. I assume you mean Auckland..the airport code is AKL, not AUK.
If you're starting out the the US.. I'm pretty sure it will be 2 awards to get you to AKL if you travel via NRT. I believe that routing is beyond the max permitted mileage for a single US-New Zealand award ticket (but I'm not 100% sure of that).
Whoops, thanks!!! Appreciate everyone's responses.....
As for the "vai NRT" piece, that is one of the routings available on "saver awards" which I thought was extremely odd, but figured it was because of the "saver" price. Total travel time was an additional 13 hours or so, so figured it would be cool to see Japan for a couple of days if they would allow the stopover. Sounds like it has to be continuous though for it to count as 1 award.