Please be kind. I have never attempted to book a "miles/award" ticket on United before so I am new to this.

So, I am trying to fly my family of four to Sydney from Houston (one way) this July. I would prefer to fly business due to the length of the flight. [This is for a cruise that goes from Sydney to Singapore. We are flying home from Singapore on Singapore Airlines after the cruise and I already have those tickets. Purchased 3 with miles and paid cash for the 4th.] I have about 650k united miles and with another ~150k coming in the next month but I would like to go ahead and book the tickets. The one-way pricing for business is running about $8k each so not going to pay that for four people. The miles tickets on our dates are currently running 250k from Houston or, from LA, 200k. So, flying to LA on our own dime and then booking the 200k each flight would be an option...but it means waiting another month for the rest of my points/miles to post which makes me nervous. Premium economy is 220k miles so there is no real advantage to booking PE with miles.

I thought about buying PE tickets and upgrading with miles to business. However, my understanding is that only 5-10 percent of people (without status) who buy premium economy and upgrade with miles to business typically get upgraded so that doesn't seem like a good solution. Especially since I am trying to upgrade 4 people.

Thus, I inquired with United via instant messaging how much it would be to upgrade to business from economy with money if I paid for the initial economy tix with miles (only 55k miles vs the 250k miles.) The agent told me $800 per person. So, according to this agent, I would get an $8k flight for 55k miles + $800. That does not seem right to me. At all. Does that seem right to you? If so, it is an amazing deal.

Alternatively, anyone else have any other ideas on how to finagle four people in biz without dropping $32k? I suppose I could do what we did on the way back and buy 3 tix with miles and pay cash for the 4th. My husband will not make the trip unless he is in business. He is older than I am (50), complains about his back, and hates long-haul flights anyway. [In fact, I have even considered just taking the kids on my own because he generally doesn't even seem to want to go on the trip at all.] Only other thing I can come up with is for me to fly in coach with my kids and just let him fly in business by himself. My kids are 9 and 11. The 11 year-old (almost 12) would be fine in coach because he would just sleep and play on his phone and not even talk to anyone, but the 9 year-old would potentially try to talk to anyone sitting beside him or try to get them to play games with him (like 20 questions or "I spy") and bother them, so I feel like he needs to fly with us. And I feel like it would be super mean to have 3 of us in business and my poor 11 year-old back in coach. So, long story short, I feel like a parent needs to be with the kids.

The reason I am doing this last minute is that we were supposed to take a segment of a Princess world cruise that went around Asia and through the red sea and ended in Greece. It was re-routed due to the Houthi attacks and is no longer a cruise we want to go on because it is now 31 days of sea days and completely skips ALL the Asian ports (main reason we were going on the cruise) and now just goes straight from Australia, around the horn of Africa and then ends in Barcelona. Half of the ports are (Gibraltar, spain, Portugal) are ones we have already been on and I don't want to float in the ocean for 31 days on a 40-day cruise. So, I canceled the world cruise and found a Carnival cruise that goes from Australia to Singapore and makes several stops in Asia. I can't use the original airfare for the first cruise because it was different dates.