OK I must be on brain dead pills (it is the weekend afterall!) but I'm STILL confused!!! I do not understand why you would "HAVE TO PAY" to fly UA to NZ, vs. award on QF. In your first post you said you "will have 270,000 dividend miles and Amex MR points by the end of this month" - I take that to mean that when you combine MR points and US miles you'll have 270k miles by the end of this month.

According to the US Airways Star Award chart (http://www.usairways.com/dividendmil...art_042304.pdf):

North America -> OZ/NZ is 120k in C, so for 3 you'd need 360k

If you used QF award, where you would have to pay extra to get to a gateway like LAX or JFK then yes, it's 315k (105k x 3)

And if you used the UA award you'd only pay 90k, but UA does not serve NZ at all.

I think whichever way you look at it you'll have to pay in some form or other. You may find OK availability on QF BNE-LAX so that part is OK, but getting to BNE could be difficult, and QF doesn't serve Queenstown-BNE direct so you may not be able to get that as part of the award (the terms and conditions on the US site are a bit unclear about QF awards).

So, I'm a little confused, but I see your dilema more clearly. I think it breaks down to this:

If you use QF, you less miles to get to the award for 3, but you still have to get to a gateway, and you may not be able to include NZ AND AU in the same award.

If you use US, you can afford the award for all 3 but it would only get you to, for example SYD, and then you'd have to buy extra to AKL and/or BNE.

If you buy 2 QF J you still have the problem of finding a fare to match the award you want to do - it could be expensive.

I think if it was me it might be easier to redeem 3 US/UA awards: CLT-LAX/SFO-SYD. Fares to NZ are very cheap currently with NZ EK QF and DJ battling it out - you can usually find tix to AKL/WLG/CHC for ~$150 AUD each way. you could then add on a SYD-BNE-SYD ticket - around $80 AUD each way. I think NZ may even fly queenstown-BNE in the winter, but I'm not 100% on that. Therefore you'd be looking at an extra oh, $500odd USD/pp as a rough guess.

Another option is to purchase 2 Star awards (240k): CLT-AKL(stop)-BNE(stop)-AKL-SFO/LAX-CLT. Purchase internal NZ flights at cheap prices. Combine 3rd ticket roundtrip CLT-AKL fare, and use the 30k spare miles for award ticket on NZ AKL-BNE-AKL for the 3rd person (this may well be cheaper than a fare to try and cover what you want, though a crafty travel agent may be able to help). The outlay here would then be the cost of a J ticket CLT-AKL (expensive, but cheaper than 2 QF J tickets!).

Seems to me the biggest problem with all of this is to combine awards with revenue tickets - whichever way you do it it could get messy. Much easier if you can just somehow make up the extra 90k miles and redeem 3 C star awards - though availability may kill you on that one.