Originally Posted by
flightmedic
For those trying to use miles in my limited experience it is tough. We traveled in June 2013 and I made the air exactly 330 days in advance using expertflyer to determine availability. It looked like ATN opened up 2 business and 6 coach seats for AA miles each flight. Our outgoing flight was on the date I wanted but we had one extra day on the return as the flight was not available.
That's why my stash of AS and HA miles are becoming very valuable. Availability with AF is pretty good in Y. I just looked at some dates in March and April and there is availability one or two flights a week. Yes you can use your DL miles as well but you have the flexibility of doing one-ways with AS and you redeem at a lower redemption rate than DL. I was looking at using 12.5K BA miles to do LAX-OGG on AA. Spend a 3 or 4 days in Maui and then do OGG-PPT for 27.5K HA miles. And come back PPT-LAX on AF using 40K AS miles. I could probably do it in reverse order as well.