I've spent a few hours on the forum today (among hundreds of hours lurking in the past) just brushing up on mRTW booking strategies, because I'm just about to get open space (330 days) for a booking I've been planning for a while! But I have some questions...
The route is: IAD-CDG (stop)-TPE-HKG (turnaround) - TPE-KIX-HND (stop)-YVR-YEG-DEN/IAH-IAD (MPM valid, I swear)
The first goal is to minimize YQ, so I read somewhere that you can estimate with ITA Matrix. Unfortunately there's only so many flights you can pop into the multi-city search, so I tried to segment it by turnaround. Now I know that my turnaround (HKG "destination") has YQ-impact legislation, and I was choosing to fly with no/low YQ carriers (SN, UA, BR), but my YQ still ended up being a surprising C$528 on estimation, am I doing it right? Or is this what I should expect to pay?
Secondly, I know it's a bit early to find UA availability from YEG-IAH-IAD but doing 330 days out (or less) in Jan 2020, Dec 2019, or even Nov 2019 shows no space at all! Is this because UA credit card holders get access to so many seats and they've taken them all? Or in everyone's experience is UA stringent with this kind of routing? Or YEG-DEN on UA Express...do they often not give availabilities? Getting worried about how I'll get back to the east coast without booking AC all the way for max YQ
Thanks!