Help booking award flight from LAX --> VTE
 

Hello Flyertalk Community!

I need some advise on booking an award flight from LAX to VTE without going through BKK. I have plenty of Amex MR and SPG points. If possible, I'd like to stop in TPE or ICN for a couple nights if an award allows for it without increasing the price.

What do you suggest?

Thanks in advance!

SkyTeam through China

Looks like your only options if you don't want to fly Thai (and keep in mind, you could still fly through Bangkok but spend time elsewhere on the way if you can get a routing that works), are Kunming or Nanning on China Eastern, Guangzhou on China Southern, or Hanoi or Phnom Penh on Vietnam.

Chris

I've never booked a stopover before, and am a Star Alliance person, but if you want to visit TPE, that looks really complicated. ICN looks easier compared to TPE.

If booking with UA miles for example, you could do something like ORD-TPE, TPE-BKK-VTE, VTE-BKK-NRT-ORD.

Chris

Yeah, but OP said no BKK

If I were to understand correctly, I would think the OP meant that he/she wanted a stopover in a place that wasn't BKK to experience something different. Merely making a connection in BKK, I would assume, wouldn't be off the table unless there were some legal issues involved.

Chris

Actually UA does not allow stopovers. However, it allows an “Excursionist Perk”, which is a free one-way award within select multi-city itineraries. According to the UA MilagePlus rules, The origin and destination of the Excursionist Perk is within a single MileagePlus defined region. This is the UA example, which can be done for a total of 60K miles:

1. ORD - LHR, 30K miles
2. LHR - CDG, 0 miles
3. CDG - ORD, 30K miles

UA considers Laos to be in South Asia, which includes Bangladesh, Bhutan, Brunei, Cambodia, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Laos, Macau, Malaysia, Myanmar (Burma), Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam. So the OP can’t do ORD-TPE, TPE-BKK-VTE, VTE-BKK-NRT-ORD, unless he/she is willing to do them as 3 individual 1-way awards.

I assumed it meant they did not want to step foot in Suvarnabhumi airport.

Thanks for the replies!! Yeah I would just like to avoid the BKK airport all together. So, it looks like I may need to book two separate awards? Maybe and LAX to TPE, then TPE to VTE?

China Air does TPE->PNH->VTE
Vietnam Air does TPE->HAN->VTE

There's also the other Chinese airlines (SkyTeam) that route through China.

KE allows stopovers at ICN. So you might be able to combine that with a flight via HAN on either KE or VN and then from there to VTE on VN. But I am not sure if there are rules on the stopover like all travel has to be on KE metal or something like that.

I did BKK-ICN-IAD last year with a week in Seoul before continuing on to IAD.

I was mistakenly thinking that Taiwan was in South Asia also. (Didn't it used to be?)

Chris