Originally Posted by
oskidunker
I have a trip next year from sfo-Bergen and then return lrh-sfo.i looked with miles I dont see the routing offered by using cadh.
The outgoing I booked award points is sfo-Frankfurt- Stavanger- Bergen . It is a 15 hour flight. All I get offered paying cash is a 19 hour flight . I booked business for 270,000 points. Coach rt is offered for 56,000 miles.
I tried to manually input the trip and it came to about $11,000 in cash in coach.. The date of departure is March 18.The last leg in to Bergen is on a small Sas plane so maybe thats why they don't want people paying cash .
i ask because a friend with no miles wanted to join me but not for $11,000. Seems like they have deals with partner airlines to get me to use miles. Any opinions ?
It's not that they "don't want you to use cash," it's that the routing rules are entirely different for the two cases. If your friend wants to fly in coach, and the same routing is available for 56,000 miles, the easiest approach is to get the necessary miles, either by buying them outright, by flying UA, as a Chase credit card bonus, as part of an Award Accelerator deal, etc. The second easiest approach is for you to give it to your friend as a gift.
(MileagePlus prohibits selling awards, but if you were to buy the tickets and your friend paid for the hotels, or something, nobody at UA would know or really care -- they mostly want to stop the brokers who try to turn it into a business). Next in line would be to price out the flights first and then see if you can find matching award space to change onto. And, finally, you can probably get the exact same flights for less money if you split them up properly -- which might be as simple as buying SVG-BGO as a separate ticket. You lose some of the protection in case of delays, but you save thousands of dollars.
Originally Posted by
sannmann
I didn’t think United flew to Stavanger or Bergen. If a partner doesn’t have award space on those flights, they won’t show up as a potential MileagePlus award.
UA hasn't flown to SVG in many years (there used to be an oil industry flight from IAH-SVG). UA introduced EWR-BGO flights this year.