Originally Posted by
ScubaAddict
But then I run into the problem of all of the airlines possibly being out of award space - so to make my question as unconfusing as possible, I let on that I had enough to get where I wanted to go, just needed to know if there is a possibility of "being too late getting to the game".
SO stating that, my plans now could be Fiji! Again this is for a late March departure for 2 people. But, sadly, I think I am too late in the game and may need to wait until next October (next vacation time) to use the miles.
As was mentioned above, it's hard to know for sure if there's availability. Certainly you can't tell anywher near all of AA's partners' availabilty from aa.com, and I you can't tell all of UA's partners' availability from united.com. Some routings that may have availabity you can only find about through calling, and only if you know the routing to suggest.
For alliance partners only, as a FlyerTalk member, you can do some free searches on AwardNexus.com by providing your FlyerTalk info. But that won't let you search on non-aliance redemption partners like Air Tahiti Nui for AA, for example.
So what you really need to is figure out which airline's miles you might be using, and then go to the forums for those particular airlines, and learn how to search for availability on
all the partner airlines that might get you to a particular destination.
(I know from reading threads in the AA forum that connecting through Tahiti sometimes works well for award trips to some other Pacific destinatons, using AA miles, when all the "major" airlines don't have availability. I don't read the UA forum much, so I don't know what the possiblities are there in that direction; I'm only familiar with UA's partners for getting to/around Scandinavia.)