Originally Posted by
PVDProf
The issue now is that you need to buy cash one-way returns. These will often be more expensive than a full round-trip with cash (no, it doesn't make intuitive sense). Therefore, instead of $1500pp roundtrips, you'll have to spend $2500pp just to get back, and have spent all your miles to get there. If this is the situation you're in, you can cancel what you've booked for free within 24 hours of booking (however, note that award inventory you've booked may not reappear for later booking).
The revenue tickets matching the return award availability you find are surely purchasable, though you may need to use multi-city search to force a particular routing, and particularly if you are moving among multiple carriers, the price might not look at all competitive.
Is your husband's ticket being covered by work, or paid by you? His elaborate trip with multiple stopovers and a need for only a single seat on most legs is much more conducive to the strengths and limitations of award bookings. In your shoes, I would probably buy your ticket and the child ticket (since you want particular desirable flights on particular days) and book your husband with miles.
Hi, thanks for this thorough explanation! What I ended up doing for the return is to book a very cheap Istanbul to Amsterdam ticket on Pegasus Air, then we'll have some fun in the city for a few days. I found a good rewards ticket for my son and I from Amsterdam to LAX. It probably wasn't the best use of my miles, but the main goal was to not spend much of my own cash on him since I have a limited budget for our trip, only the conference part is covered by work, but we'll be staying there for an extra 1.5 months. I wanted all three of us to travel together since I usually travel with my son on my own, so it will truly be luxury to have my husband with us to do the heavy lifting, it was worth spending the miles to travel on the same flight. He ended up finding a very cheap flight from IST to CAI and back to LAX, so he purchased it on his own.
The only award ticket that was viable I found for my son went through Turkish and Ethiopian airlines, and I literally could not find that same route for cash, only similar routes, and they started at $3,000, so I had to cancel his award ticket. My work gives me a budget for traveling to conferences, so I didn't spend too much on the flight, but I'll be sure to splurge on very nice hotel accommodations to make up for it :-)
thanks everyone for helping out ^
