I did some playing around with this and see it's a difficult connection. The one US-HEL flight I was seeing with steady availability was ORD-HEL. The problem is that the flight arrives HEL at 10am and the connection I want to make leaves just before 8am. It'd require an overnight stay in Helsinki to make it work.

There is a nice Hilton attached to the airport. Go into town- reminds me a lot like Alaska :cool:

Glad this is live- need to look around a bit.

Also, FI. . What else am I supposed to do when I need to get from point A (SEA) to point (B) without sixteen hour layovers? I usually only redeem from EU to SEA on BA, where taxes are less.

You can easily enjoy a whole day in HEL without getting bored at all. The Airport bus is fantastic.

When I visited, I took the train instead of the bus; it's only about half an hour to get to the city center. With a day, I'd highly suggest checking out downtown and Suomenlinna.

100% agree. Helsinki is a great city, and HEL is a fantastic, extremely efficient airport. Good beer, coffee and great food.

YMMV in the winter, though.

Nice to see the AS redemptions on AY are now live and bookable via Alaska website. The prices are a bit high from the US to Europe, but surprisingly competitive from Europe to Asia. Yeah, CX (via AS) is 42.5K vs 60K AS on AY, but I guess I hadn't realized that with UA miles, on *A partners, it can range from 75K to 100K to get to North Asia, SE Asia, and Japan. Given the benefit of linking from anywhere in Europe through HEL and then on AY's pretty cool A350 heading east, then 60K isn't a bad deal--it's even better when you aren't spending time on BA or Qantas looking for CX availability and then calling AS to book the ticket, IMHO. Is it worth the 17.5K "convenience fee" of booking on Alaska's website for a AY J fare? And while I'm inclined to say no, circumstances of dates/time/location may make sense as you can just sign into Alaska, do a search, and book a ticket.

Bottom line: it's always great to have another option from Europe to/from Asia with Alaska Miles.

Yes, finally, after a year and a half!
I played around for quite some time and out of BKK - where I am based - there isn't much. That being said, this just went live, so I am hoping more will roll out.
CX is great, but searching for availability on BA and then calling AS...oy, it can be quite a hassle.
I agree that 60k miles isn't so bad...though I regularly fly AY to Europe out of BKK in J for around $2,000 r/t. And with a JFK-HKG-BKK trip in December booked in CX F for 70k miles, well, I think I may still hold on to my miles for my BKK-North America bookings.
No question, though, it is great to see another fantastic option from Asia to Europe! Love Finnair!

Yahoo!!! I've been waiting for these to become available. Hoping to score tickets to Finland for next summer.

Has anybody actually booked an award yet?

James

Point taken with the cost of AY flights from BKK to Europe. A lot of my points and miles friends are jealous since I'm based in Europe, I can usually (quite easily) find Europe to Asia RT for about $2K. It's not an insignificant amount of money, but compared to exUS ticket prices, it's a huge savings! In fact I just did a quick search for some Sept tickets to BKK (via AMS always the best startig point for a deal IMHO) and AY is sub $1.8K with *A flights not too much higher. Of course, this brings up the eternal question of "to use miles or to pay dollars?" haha.

We've been in an accrue mode for a few years, we need to start using some miles soon. Of course, we will eventually head back to the US (in a couple of years), so stashing some miles for exUS-Asia trips isn't a bad deal either.

We, in fact, flew AY to BKK last November from FRA. We really liked AY. They use to have the 100% additional J class bonus for Alaska, but since they don't have it anymore, we've been on CX almost exclusively to Asia. Although, HKG lounges are some of the best, so it's not too much a sacrifice. haha.

My problem is one-way tickets are usually "JFC, don't I actually get a PLANE with spending that much money?!?!?!?". Being able to use miles for three one way segments (USA-Asia-EU-USA) to stitch together RTW routings (and with AS you're getting free stopovers) is helpful. It's not the salad days of 90k US *A J or 120k US *A F "mini-RTW" Asia/Europe redemptions with stopovers, but it's not terrible.

Agree. One way tickets usually are more expensive, what I like about ASMP is that you can do 2 one-way redemptions with 2 stopovers, and open-jaws is possible with the one way as well, if there is a fifth freedom route available for the carrier.