=jon=

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

Tiger_lily

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.

pogonation

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.

=jon=

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!

pogonation

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

=jon=

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

Sherwood Hampton

Pretty hard to do considering his final destination is Hawaii.

pogonation

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.

=jon=

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

LCY8737

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

o0herbie

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

erasmus99

Air Canada has lie flat seats to Hawaii.

Tiger_lily

Nope. It's been done via NRT several times

heramato

=jon=

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...