coffee18

Perhaps the upcoming deval will increase the chances for those who can afford the miles.

Happy

As long as you are not competing with flyers based in US, you will find decent availability on HKG-EU, HKG-ME. However HKG-OZ remains very hard despite CX flies to 5 or may be 6? OZ airports.

For those who want to go to South Pacific, there are 2 options work well for us (provided you have the miles AND the time), since we dont mind the routing which we work it into just another portion of the whole trip.

EU-OZ is not too hard to find, especially if you can use QR to QR via DOH.

Use UA miles to bridge you between SYD and HKG - TG flies that route via BKK. Availability, at least when we booked our trip this June, in Dec 2015, was excellent - F on almost 80% of the day and J every day. This compare extremely favorably to the CX and QF availability. On top of that UA has a cheaper chart on this route than AA's.

Gunner14

I didn't think that CX operated an F cabin on any of their Australia routes?

Happy

The limitation is because AA uses Sabre which can only handle 11 months out. Given AA used to own Sabre before selling it off, it would probably not change to Amadeus system until Sabre dies. Ain't going to happen.

Fwiw CX changed to Amadeus in 2012 IIRC. For a few months the reservation system was a huge mess. SQ did some changes on its system 2 years ago and forgot to close all the doors led to its F award seats - so for a few days the flyers from Star A partners had a field day to access F awards booked into the A380 suites...

Happy

Both ZRH and DUS are "new" routes. Folks on CX board have said ZRH route has light loads ever since it came into operation last March. People said this route has never made money since inception.

LHR, CDG and MXP are heavily booked routes. I am surprised by MXP seeing heavy loads, not at all surprised by LHR and CDG - the loads are decent enough that CX have opened its own lounges which reportedly are their best outpost lounges.

Paulchili

That's an excellent idea!
Will look into it. Can fly CX to BKK and TG to SYD or CX to HKG and TG HKG/BKK/SYD

FlyerBeek

Agree. This is one of the last excellent redemption values for UA partner rewards, in my opinion. 40k miles for up to two segments in TG F (HKG-BKK-SYD, for example) is pretty incredible.

-FlyerBeek

Superorb

You can do a lot with United. I've done LAX-FRA (stopover for 3 weeks) FRA-BKK (Destination) SIN-CTU-SFO(Open Jaw/Destination) on a single RT ticket. ATW for 120k points in Biz. Kicking myself for not doing that in F.

RedElmo

Nice! Guess UA still has its perk.

Happy

I thought you could only have either a stopover or an OJ?

UA program does not have the crazy routing rules AA has. In fact DL does not have AA's routing rule either. Therefore it is much easier to put a trip together with UA miles, especially UA has far more partners in both EU and Asia.

UA program has long had much better availability than AA program since the CO/UA merger and Starnet blocking went away.

We all know how bad AA program's availability has been in the past 2 to 3 years.

The only advantage AA has, is the close in CX F cabins and the much lower priced chart - both are disappearing.

Happy

Most definitely!

For us we actually had no choice because there was no availability out of all cities CX serves, and of course QF was zip. Yet, TG had seats everyday on 2 flights - only the 747 has F though, and is the old F but at least it is still a flat bed for the 9hrs SYD-BKK. BKK-HKG connection is in J because the F would require an overnight at BKK. Not worth it for a 747 old F.
The other direction might work better as IIRC HKG-BKK 747 departs before noon. If BKK-SYD 747 departs in the evening then you can have both segments in F and 40K sure is a bargain.

Superorb

You're allowed a stopover and 2 OJs in a single RT award. Pretty awesome compared to AA now.

Happy

That is awesome. I only used the plain stopover and destination. Was your trip bookable online using multi-cities? I never have luck doing multi-cities - it always errors out at the end, Must be something about over X segments on one direction that causes that.

SIN-CTU-SFO is interesting. I assume CTU-SFO was on CA? Our experiences on CA IAH-PEK F was one of the worst experiences we had - they did not load F foods even only 2 of us in the whole cabin. The FA told us not to bother with the menu as none would be available. She gave us 3 or 4 main dishes to choose from and only one option had 2, the others only had 1! I honestly suspected they were skimmed from J. Barely edible. Cheap wines. There were good reasons why CA seats were still available towards the bitter end of the predevaluation. lol.

Paulchili

Indeed! Especially as one is on A380 and the other on 747 (nostalgia factor - they won't be around forever )
Now, if I could only get to HKG on CX (which didn't used to be a big problem until everyone started hedging their bets prior to 3/21)

conde

FYI... I just released an award F seat LAX-> HKG for 1/13/2017, Friday the 13th. I traded it for a date that better suited my needs. I wanted to share what helped my search for availability. Although I have an account with CX Marco Polo/Asia Miles, I use the Japan Airlines Mileage Bank web site to search for availability as in the past it has best matched AA's award availability for CX. When searching for F availability from LAX to BKK, on JL's web site, I saw nothing for the date I wanted. If I switched to LAX to SIN, there were flights available, including legs from LAX to HKG which would be good for SIN or BKK! Go figure. JL's web site showed no availability for the leg going from HKG-BKK. I eventually called AA and got the flights I wanted.

Lessons learned: Just like when calling in an award reservation request to AA and asking for availability segment by segment, it is always good to search for availability yourself, segment by segment... or trying to try searching other destinations with common initial flight segments.