Originally Posted by
M60_to_LGA
I was trying to get from NYC-YYT (St. John's, Newfoundland) last year, and apparently their system didn't recognize either the city or the airport. It took over a day of calls back and forth before they could get my itinerary to work.
The supervisors in their call center have a different technology platform available to do the booking. So if you have any problems, it's definitely worthwhile to escalate directly to a supervisor. Use
ITA Software to price out the itinerary you want in advance, then give the fare codes directly to the supervisor. They should be able to find whatever you can find. (With the exception that sometimes ITA will price an itinerary with "phantom" availability that doesn't actually exist; you should be able to find any ITA itinerary on Orbitz and go all the way to the payment page to make sure the availability is real.)
Are you saying that in general airline miles give you a better implied cash value when redeemed for international travel awards?
In most programs, miles do not have a fixed redemption value. Instead, awards are priced based on the regions of travel, not the cost of the underlying ticket. Therefore, the actual cash equivalent value you derive will vary.
In your NYC-YYT example, I ran a search with random dates and see $479. That would be just over 35000 TYP. Assuming you could find availability, that same trip using United miles would be 25000 miles.
Compare to something like NYC-MCO. Cash shows $232. TYP would then be just over 17000. UA miles would still be 25000. In this case, fewer TYP than UA.
The key is finding availability. If you have flexibility and determination, you can find it. (And if you follow enough of the techniques on FT, you can build both TYP and miles affordably, and let the individual situation determine what you use.)