Hi all. Firstly this thread is fantastic. Although reading it has been the direct cause of several hours of fruitless searching to solve a dilemma I’ll describe below. Sorry in advance for the post length
Its become somewhat of a January tradition for me to look for a MR both to get a head start on status for the year and burn an expiring GPU or two. I’m looking at trying to make this work with the island hopper. I am traveling ex YYC and also have a $1000 voucher available.
As a revenue ticket, I can’t find any way to get on the island hopper and have it price below about C$2,400. I’ve tried multi city flights throigh NRT, HKG and HNL, as well as positioning to SFO, LAX or DEN and I’ve hit a total brick wall. Even flying straight through with < 24 hours in GUM can’t get me a decent price unless I fly the non stop. Choosing the hopper seems to kick me into a Q fare which makes it very expensive.any tips on getting this to work for a somewhat affordable price?
many of the blogs seem to do this on miles. I have found tons of mileage availability on the island hopper itself, however I’m still facing the same kind of issues getting a multi city connecting to the island hopper to price affordably. Eg. YYC-HNL/TYO-YYC, or the reverse. The best I can do is around C$1,300, but this only seems available if doing the hopper eastbound.
Doing the whole trip with miles isn’t feasible for me because it would leave my voucher unused and because I need some PQMs from it.
Final question on using miles just for the island hopper portion. Some of the times don’t make any sense. The screenshot below shows one example, but I found many. Does this flight actually have 6 hours overnight in TKK?? And 8:49am to 3:20pm is definitely not 14.5 hours. I would love a short layover on any of the islands if it is possible (preferably not 1am to 7am 😐
, but are these schedules believable??
Thanks in advance for those able to help me out with this one.
