Booking

The most difficult get with points was going to probably be the beach resort somewhere in Asia, and I spent a few days looking around at what was available and when. I eventually found five nights in peak season at the Conrad Koh Samui and gladly waved goodbye to five years’ worth of Hilton points.

Booking this well in advance, I had no trouble finding premium cabin space for most of the long outbound flights on a combination of ANA, Thai, and Air New Zealand. I booked San Francisco to Koh Samui with Singapore KrisFlyer miles and Koh Samui to Auckland with United MileagePlus miles shortly before that remaining award chart sweet spot went away.

The return from New Zealand would be a little trickier, and due to some quirks in award charts, I found a couple of Singapore Suites flights as far as Hong Kong and a separate Cathay Pacific flight back to San Francisco on an Alaska award for fewer points than booking Singapore Airlines the whole way home.

Leaving it to Thai Airways to change one’s plans at the last minute, though: instead of doing an aircraft swap for the one ancient 737-400 they were inexplicably keeping around for the short hop between Bangkok and Samui, they canceled the flights entirely. I called in to KrisFlyer and MileagePlus and got answers from well-meaning agents on both calls that since no Star Alliance carrier served the route anymore our only options were to drop the segments between Bangkok and Koh Samui or to have our tickets refunded entirely.

I ended up having to buy the short hop on Bangkok Airways, now the only carrier serving the route, about a month before departure for a cool full-fare economy price of $339 per person round trip or 59 cents per mile. But hey, if we had gone to the Maldives or Bora Bora or so many other distant resort locales we would have spent just as much for a connecting flight.