Originally Posted by
cloudsurfer1
First let me say that I might be developing an obsession with reading FT.
Welcome to FT! This is probably par for the course
Originally Posted by
cloudsurfer1
As an American currently studying/living in AU, trips back to the US get rather expensive. Looking for some tips on maximising flights, booking, routing ect.
I am married with one child, so there are three of us. All three of us currently have about 20k miles with UA and 27K with Qantas. My wife was approved for the 65K max MP Xplorer, mines still pending. We're open to doing 1-3 day stopovers just to break up the whole flying marathon. We're newbies at this, anything is appreciated !! Thanks
Flying between the US and Australia is generally a more difficult award to get than most, but it's certain do-able. Are you wanting to fly in coach or business/first? Coach will generally run you 80k miles roundtrip per person, while business class will be about 135k roundtrip per person. You can also look into getting one of the Chase cards (Ink or Sapphire) that offer Chase Ultimate Rewards Points, which are transferrable to United.
I'm mainly a Star Alliance flyer (United, etc) but others can give you input on your OneWorld (American, Qantas, etc) options.
Even without miles in your United account, you can use the United website to search for award availability to get an idea of when flights might be available. There are other sites like AwardNexus that also let you do searches, and paid services like KVS and ExpertFlyer. In general, when doing your searches, I'd recommend mainly focusing on the overwater segment (i.e. probably SYD-SFO or SYD-LAX) rather than adding in the BNE-segment right now. Getting from BNE-SYD will probably be relatively trivial compared to the rest of the trip. With Star Alliance (United miles), you can also fly with Air New Zealand (NZ), connecting in AKL. New Zealand could be a great place for a stopover.
I've also flown ADL-AKL (stopover for a few days), then AKL-HNL (stop for about 20 hours, since you're only allowed 1 stopover >24 hours), then HNL-ORD. It was fun to grab a quick day in Hawaii, while both AKL-HNL and HNL-ORD were only 7-8 hours instead of the 14 or so that a nonstop SYD-SFO takes.
I do know that Qantas does have nonstop service from BNE-DFW, so that may be an option as well.
Hope that helps a little!