Hello guys,

I now have 35,000 Asia Miles due to expire on 31 July 2010.

I'm a regular traveller between Hong Kong and London, and I have enough miles to select a reward flight which requires 60,000.

However, I have been told that all reward tickets until 16 Jan 2011 on this route are all sold out - but I MUST make my journey to London some time in October and return in December. As a result, because I link my Asia Miles account to my family, they are using these 35,000 miles to redeem a ticket to/from HK and Taipei, as they thought these 35,000 would be wasted.

The question is: Is this rule true that redeemed tickets have a deadline, and so soon? And shall I wait until nearer to 31 July to make sure there really are no reward seats? What is your advice?

Many thanks for your help and hope this is not too confusing.

Award tickets are valid for one year from the day of ticketing.

So you may want to issue an award ticket to your preferred destination in late July, which will then be expired in July 2011. Then change to your preferred date of travel should seats become available, as rebooking is free of charge. Obviously this doesn't guarantee you'll be able to fly on your preferred date.

You already got an excellent reply, but to add to that there's always the waitlist option. So far in all my waitlists I have no problem getting a ticket.

I think CX doesn't pre-release too many reward seats, however, as the departure time gets closer and there are seats open, then CX will offer more reward seats. To them, reward seats are throw away seats and that's my guess why they are so frugal on reward seats.

My experience with waiting for (peak season) seats (for HK-Sydney) is that Cathay would put a big chunk of seats ~9 months out from the time I want to fly, then slowly but gradually yank them off the system.