Ok... so with the help of FT, I am starting to make some headway in firming up the master plan for our epic one-way trip in J next year to Penang, Malaysia
This forum totally rocks! Thank-you to all who have helped!
The plan: pay cash for flights from Winnipeg to Kahului, Maui in July 2014 - stay for a month or two... pay cash for flights from Kahului to HNL,
then use my reward miles to book a one-way flight for 4 of us from HNL to PEN in J. (target flight dates to PEN would be late August or late September 2014. (If I can use my reward miles all the way from Kahului to Penang, then someone please correct me!!)
(note: I'm only trying to gain experience with what is possible/probable at this point since tickets aren't released yet for my target departure from HNL)
Also, this won't qualify for a mini-RTW itinerary since we will be gone for more than a year.
I've been playing around with the ANA search tool, and also this one,
http://flisea.com , recommended to me on another thread.
If I plug in a search from HNL to PEN, then all flights eventually route to BKK, and we'd end up spending the flight to and from BKK in TG economy. bleh... I want J darn it!!! lol I understand that I could book the seats 2 at a time for the legs on TG, that I'll find J for those flights, but since we're flying with our kids, we reaaaally want to sit all together - I don't want to risk booking 2 seats in J, and then not being able to find the other 2 matching seats in J for the rest of us.
So, I checked out what happens if I pretend I only want to fly from HNL to SIN and woot! woot! I find 4 J seats for the entire journey. It isn't all that expensive (and only about 3 hours travel time including stop in KL) to fly from SIN to PEN, so not the end of the world if I had to pay cash for economy flights for that.
But, can I do better than this? Any suggestions from the experts out there would be enormously appreciated
I want to milk these Aeroplan points for all they're worth!