Redemption - Which Carrier to Hawaii...
 

Hi All,

Holiday season is looming for me again, and this time we are looking at a trip to Hawaii on my miles.

Looking at the redemption chart, it's going to cost the same going from Zone 1 or Zone 2, so with this in mind, who is going to give us the best service for the initial transatlantic hop (all of the US to Hawaii flights are UA / CO)

Options seem to be:

ZRH - SFO on Swiss
FRA - LAX on LH
FRA - LAX on UA

or possibly the leftfield option of FRA -> NRT going the other way round - there's only a few hours in it.

Any other good options I've missed?

I've enough miles to do either business or first, but would probably look at cash + miles.

Last option is to hold off and hope that star upgrades come into play soon, and look at buying Y flights and upgrading, but without firm dates and rates it's a bit of an unknown at the moment :(

Having never been to Hawaii and reading a lot of conflicting reviews of where's best to go, any advice on which island, what to see etc is also appreciated :)

Thanks

Jon

You could also do ZRH-LAX and ZRH-NRT both on LX.

Also look at CDG-NRT but you would have to get to Paris first.

Best options IMO would be LHR-NRT or FRA-NRT with NH (both routes are operated by the 77W with new fully flat C) or ZRH-NRT with Swiss. Personally I would avoid the US if possible and pass through NRT which is a dream in comparison. Also getting seats on the ZRH-NRT route is pretty easy.

Thanks for the replies. I've flown through NRT quite a bit and it is very efficient... The new NH setup is very nice too - our last redemption ended up coming back in NH in C which was great (long story, there's a thread about in on here from March-ish).

I guess going from NH C to UA C is going to be a bit of a step down for the next hop though! ;)

NH flies to HNL on their 777-200ER so you will be able to connect to NH C (albeit a reclining seat) for the rest of the journey ^

But for the best trip I would do LX F ZRH-NRT and connect to UA F (I hate UA F but when connecting from a 12hr flight to a 7hr flight the fully flat bed make's it the best choice IMO). The only problem is that LX F doesn't connect well with the UA flight. You would really need to fly NH F for a nice connection but good luck finding Nh F seats :(

Ahh, cool :) Strange that the *A flight search tool only shows NH -> UA though :confused:

Pretty hard to do considering his final destination is Hawaii.

It's because all the NH flights from Europe arrive into NRT around 15:00 - 15:30 so there would be a much bigger wait to fly NH at 21:30 than UA at 19:25.

Makes sense I suppose...

Re. UA F, I fly approx 80-90K miles/year long haul in Y, anything that gives me a bit of leg room and food not served on a plastic tray is much appreciated ;)

Wasn't there a routing rule that said Europe - Hawaii needed to go via North America?

No mention of NZ to LAX yet? Standards are slipping!

Air Canada has lie flat seats to Hawaii.

Nope. It's been done via NRT several times

:D:D

Been trawling through the ANA tool looking for availability for Europe -> HNL or KOA via pretty much any route I can think of for the 24th Sept -> 8th October and there really doesn't seem to be a lot available, even going 10 days forward doesn't help a lot - seats start showing up as RQ (request availability from Airline) for everything...