Originally Posted by
Mwenenzi
Welcome to NZ
How long will you be in NZ for?
A few months/years or for ever?
As an aside Air NZ (Star Alliance) is incredibly stingy about release premium awards to other ffp's. And 2 pax even less
.
Guessing the HA-AS flight could not credit to AAdvantage. Did you check? Small amounts of ff miles are basically orphaned. Little to nil value.
For travel to South Africa or Kenya the middle east carriers are likely to be best. QF fly SYD to Jo-berg. You probably will end up on QR Qatar.
Do not fly OW just for ff miles/avios/points. Other airlines may have better price - schedules.
Hi Mwenenzi. Thank you for the welcome. We absolutely love it here. We found a great place to settle down, and we enjoy the laid back lifestyle here.
The move is permanent. We only plan to visit family and friends in the US.
I understand that Air New Zealand has a hub here, and Qantas has a small operations here.
1) For travel to Africa, which we do once a year, travel on OW seems to be either through HKG or SYD. With A*, it seems to require three flights on some combination of Thai and Ethiopian, unless traveling to JNB with SQ via SIN.
2) To the US with OW, we could either do Qantas to JFK to elsewhere via Sydney, Brisbane or Melbourne, or HA via HNL.
To the US with *A, we could go to LAX, SFO, IAH & JFK.
3) To Europe, it's either via the west coast or JFK or via Asia or Middle East.
Based on this premise and that the cost of the tickets we purchased were a good deal cheaper than travel on *A, we decided to book the trip with OW.
For what it's worth, HA wouldn't credit to AA because the AS-HA merger hadn't gone through by the time we flew in January. And I contacted AA. They will not reinstate the miles. Too much time had passed. I was under the assumption that the miles did not expire. They did.