Originally Posted by
gudugan
Any easy way of searching for possible itineraries?
I'm primarily interested in US - China - TPE or TPE - China - US. I'm okay with a bunch of layovers in random places in the interim.
For example if I pick PVG/PEK there are direct flights to TPE/TSA so that's not that hard, and there are a bunch of flights from PVG/PEK to the US.
But if I pick something like CTU then lots of the options have layovers in another Chinese city so that's not possible. I can manually exclude layover cities in Google Flights I guess? On the flip side, if I pick a direct flight from PVG to TPE, I can't fly US-layover TPE-PVG either, so have to exclude those itineraries too.
Side note, having Chengdu and Chongqing on two separate TWOV areas is annoying.
In your case, I would do US-Taiwan-China on one ticket and China-<anywhere other than Taiwan> on the way out.
US-Taiwan-China is currently a little better than US-China-Taiwan because US-China fares are high (e.g. JFK-PVG-TPE is 3x the price of JFK-TPE-PVG).
For the return flight, you should have a lot of decent options (including nonstops to the US). Just excluding BR and CI from your acceptable airline list will almost guarantee that you aren't pushed itineraries that entail flying from China to Taiwan.