I'm trying to come up with a not-too-expensive run to the west coast of the USA (we have friends in SFO, but SAN, LAX, PHX are all of interest) for the first week in April. The earliest we (2 of us) can go is 31st March and we need to be back in the UK on 9th April at the latest (but earlier is fine). This is the best I've been able to come up with:
I couldn't get the return flights in F going via JFK, but it is available going SFO-LHR direct (two J legs earn more points, of course). It's a bit cheaper to do it all in J but the price difference to F was not too great. Does anyone have any ideas of how I could either lower the price or improve the TP return? Happy to start/finish most exEU places, but the nearer/cheaper to position to the better. I was hoping to avoid the OTP-PHX run because of the expense (no reward flights available on our dates) and time taken (we couldn't B2B because we'd have checked baggage) of positioning to OTP. Plus, I don't really like Bucharest
, and while on our dates I can find it for £1,207pp in J, it shoots up to about £2,500 if I tried to do it in F.
Any ideas? Or should I suck it up and do OTP-PHX?