How best to secure reward travel YYZ-DAR, maybe on Turkish?
 

Just over a year from now, I will need to fly round-trip from Toronto to Dar es Salaam. I'd like to try for reward seats in J. I have the necessary miles.

It looks as if the ideal option would be on Turkish, YYZ-IST-DAR. Fewest stops, good airline, shiny new airport for the connection. Maybe I'm dreaming, thinking I can get seats, but it can't hurt to try. Any advice would be welcome. Should I sign up as a Turkish Airlines Miles & Smiles member and check their reward availability at the appropriate time? And/or are there other tools I should consider, apart from Aeroplan's search engine?

I ask in part because I'm rusty at this kind of strategy, and also because in playing around on the Aeroplan site with dates next spring, I never see TK's non-stop IST-DAR come up as an option.

Many thanks in advance for any wise words.

The United search is often cited as a helpful *A and thus Aeroplan tool. Get a UA account, log in and go to the book with points section. If you check "Flexible dates" you'll get a calendar view of the month you picked for date as well as the next month showing all the available dates. Pretty helpful.
I'm seeing lots of direct TK for IST-DAR so I'm guessing the one you're seeing limited results for is actually TK YYZ-IST J. That *has* been very iffy - TK don't seem to be releasing much to Canadian cities. Might have to look though a US city: YYZ-BOS-IST-DAR looks promising.
Not as fashionable of course but ET would be the other obvious option YYZ-ADD-DAR on their new A350s.
EDIT: Grammer

Thanks, and you're right about IST-DAR. I wasn't clear. If I use the Aeroplan site and try YYZ-DAR, I don't see the TK non-stop options. I do see them come up if I try IST-DAR instead. So I guess I should break the legs down like that, and when the time comes, if all the pieces align, I call Aeroplan and spoon feed the segments?

I appreciate the UA, connect-thru-US, and ET suggestions. I'll add those to the toolbox.

last time i went I connected in YUL and ZRH on LX, thought t was a good routing. Its all Widebody J, TK was using a long leg 737 service IST DAR last time i checked.

I just did this, in J, for 3 people.

We flew YYZ-GRU-JNB-DAR.... all widebody ie-flat except the last leg on SA .

If interested, you could also try to find YYZ-IAD-JNB-DAR.

Historically I've had very good luck finding ORD-IST award availability, so that's another US connection option.

TK is now flying A330 twice a week which then connects on to LUN if I am not mistaken. Worth checking to get the dates right.

You may want to check ET also? Not as good in terms of service as AC or TK though. But non stop YYZ-ADD.

Thanks all for the suggestions.

Wow. That's a long way to get there. I'd prefer to minimize connections. Did you want to stop over in GRU or JNB for some reason? And out of curiosity, how did you get that route? AE website search engine? Phone? Other?

LOL
I know its a long way...but we wanted J and for 3 people.

The way i figured it, is that the routes through Europe have you travelling over 2 nights...first night overnight to Europe, then all day in Europe, and the 2nd night overnight flight to Africa. So we had a similar experience... Overnight to GRU (spent the day in GRU and organized a city tour) and then another overnight to JNB. As we were in J with lie-flats, we had great sleeps on both overnights.

I had to call in in to book that itinerary (at a $30 cost per ticket) and feed them the segments one by one. But managed to find J x 3 seats on each flight.

One of the issues i found with IST and some of the cnx through Europe was that some flights of 5-7 hours ended up being on a narrow-body aircraft with no lie-flats.

We took the same route home and spent 28 hours in JNB and got to look around the city... it was great!

SA has some very nice South African wines on board!