Family of 5 to Hawaii
 

Hello all – very much enjoying reading this forum for the last year or so. I'm already well on my way to Gold - with a TP to HNL over Easter, together with NYC this coming July. Both booked as ex-EU. I'm now looking to check my planning on how best to take my family to Hawaiian Islands – in July/August 2017 for 3 weeks.

Background
- I'm UK based - Northampton
- Avios ~500k
- Will be BA Gold in August, rest of family will be bronze.
- 2 x 241 with BA Amex by the time I need to book
- I’m tight :D – need to be, when paying for all 5 tickets

I think my options are;

- (Original idea) Use the 241s to fly LHR to LAX or other west coast BA destination – assuming I can get the availability, and get the 5th ticket with my Avios. And then sort out ticket to/from the islands with Avios or cash – depending on what is better value.
- Wait for another x-EU sale and hope for ~£1100 or less for each person. Tad expensive for me, but would do this if I could get everyone to silver as a result.

Accommodation will follow closer to the time - but like the idea of a house or apartment and also taking in a couple of the islands.

Kids will be 17, 14 and 12 - thinking about exploring options of having them sit down the back - should help with availability, and I’m sure they would happily take the difference as holiday spending money.

Would appreciate any comments/pointers.

Thanks,

Crisp bag

Check out the premium deals J/F thread. HNL can be had now ex-CDG for c£1105pp.

Hi crisp bag I think your only option (being tight :D) is to sit back and wait for the appropriate exEU to cover next summer.

I would say during July/Aug you'll get close to £1k per person; and make yourself another 150k air miles between you five. There's little chance of getting five seats on a flight to LAX in CW so you'll end up on separate flights / cities and it will be more stressful and costly overall...

Also - down the back from LHR in summertime is around the £1k mark anyway?

As you know its a long trip to sit down the back for the kids and at least for us its part of the adventure for them to experience J/F on our LH family trips. Since your looking at 3 weeks you have a little more time to recover or add on a couple of days to explore a westcoast city, so apart from LAX you could look at other westcoast with OW directs you could fly into SFO and AS has OAK to HNL, SEA is another possibility. Getting AS avois at their saver rates to Hawaii might be the challenge especially 5 of them. Also July/August is a busy time for Hawaii I was trying to use some Disney vacation points recently and couldn't find dates for family of 5 for more than an odd night in the whole of June/July/August at Aulani on Oahu.

Thanks for the replies - the planned trip is for July/August 2017 - so I have some more time to plan. As Avios availability opens up - I'll review the options of using the 241s at that point, failing that I'll wait for that sale.

I managed to use a couple of 241s to purchase four LHR-LAX seats in CW, before heading off to KOA and OGG on a paid ticket in Y.

I wouldn't do that again. The trip from LAX to the islands in Y, in an aged AA 757, was interminable. A red eye would have been even worse.

Better - and quite possibly more cost effective - to wait for an ex-EU sale fare and do the whole trip in a degree of comfort.

I'd say the ex-PAR fare is your best bet: I'm looking at an ex-ORY ticket to HNL and back for £1,100 totalling 980TPs and the transatlantic sectors on Openskies which I'm looking forward to.

Even if you don't need the TPs it's around 30,000 avois pp which isn't to be sniffed at.