Originally Posted by
j2simpso
I'm wondering from a ticketing perspective if I'm travelling to the Americas if it would make sense to simply book roundtrips out of a UA West coast hub (i.e. SFO or LAX) then piece together the remaining travel I have with other flight products versus doing multi-city tickets?
This is complicated and it's worth pricing out alternatives when you want to travel. There are often extreme variety in fares between ANZ and specific cities in the US such that a split ticket connection can make sense, although not always at the gateway. My last trip down under, we split-ticket connected in SAN since it was cheaper than any gateway. SFO-AKL can be double the price of LAX-AKL. Generally, however, you don't want to do a multi-city circle trip with domestic US segments because of end-on-end restrictions.
Originally Posted by
j2simpso
One other question - I'll likely be flying to Europe as well from SYD. What are the best options over there? I know SQ and have pretty good coverage but sadly they tend to have some of the lowest PQM earnings on MilagePlus. Alternatively, I can take UA all the way to Europe by first taking a "domestic" trip to the US then connecting on to the European flight.
This is a bit tricky on Star Alliance. Your most efficient routings are obviously flying west from Australia, but you need to do this on a "less preferred partner" at least as far as Asia, when you can switch to LH or LX. On JV metal the whole way, you're going to have to back-connect in AKL and continue on NZ metal via Asia to LH Group metal, or just transit the US which is ugly in its own right.