robyng

Maybe . Still - it is nice to know that I got at least one ticket at rock bottom price.

FWIW - I was thinking yesterday that it's good to book everything on one airline and - if at all possible - on one reward ticket. Just a few days after I booked this trip for September 2013 - the ATL/NRT flight was changed to about an hour earlier. Making our 1.5 hour connection time from JAX in ATL 26 minutes <yikes>. Had I been on a different airline - or even a separate paid or reward ticket on DL - I probably would have had to pay some kind of change fee on the JAX/ATL part of our flight. Since the whole booking was on RT DL reward tickets - DL just moved us to an earlier flight out of JAX. No problems. I think everything is a constant cost/benefit analysis in terms of time/money/aggravation. At my age - I have less time - more money - and don't need any aggravation .

BTW - at least on DL - do you happen to know whether it is normal for DL to add an originating airport to international hub mileage surcharge on flights in terms of miles? That seemed to be what I came up with for the most part in my search - except for this one 120k ticket out of my home airport. In all honesty - I only book these tickets once every year or two - and not necessarily on the same airline. So I can't remember my last DL booking.

Finally - one thing I forgot to mention yesterday. A person can run into problems in terms of checking baggage fees/checking bags through if he or she is booking a BF flight out of a hub - but buying the local gateway to hub and return portion separately. Assuming you don't have a credit card or something else that allows you to check luggage for free. I don't know how it works on DL - but on our last trip on UA - you got 3 free bags on BF. We only travel with 2 checked bags. So - as long as we had one RT ticket out of our local airport - we were good to go. Robyn

P.S. I assume just about everyone here caught today's article in the WSJ about frequent flyer stuff.