Originally Posted by
3Cforme
You don't cite your U.S. origin. This makes a big difference. If you happen to be on the West Coast there are ready bargains. Rather than messing around with separate tickets, possibly needing to recheck bags, separate baggage allowance by cabin, multiple change fees, and IROPs difficulty, there are r/t REP business tickets for less than $3K from LAX (and less than CDN $3K from YVR), even restricting travel to just two segments each way. A China Eastern business ticket will score well in Delta MQM. Find dates with cheap r/t then check for your open jaw faring. Origin, month of departure (for advance purchase restrictions) and length of stay are all important.
RDU is my home airport (as someone earlier noted, Hoya = DC, Heel = NC ;-) so east coast), August/Sept is when we're traveling, and Skyteam options all >$4000 business per person (and that's to ICN or NRT, so would still have to do the add-ons to SGN and REP) so more than I want to spend. I did a flexible date search too and found almost no variation over a 2 month period (our travel time period is pretty specific as we're doing a river cruise - we haven't booked the cruise so we could choose different weeks, but we know we want to go in August....) Heck, NON skyteam options for business are all >$4000 as well....I just checked EVA JFK-BKK roundtrip as someone suggested up thread and they were ~$2300 per person in premium economy, $5300 in business...
We're not worried about the weather in Vietnam or Cambodia - we did a SIN-HKG cruise a couple years ago with 6 days in Singapore ahead of time - the first day in Singapore was, um, "warm", but we adapted pretty quickly. Lots of water, rest when we need to - it's all good! ;-)