Dahan

Hi, I want to get two business class round trip tickets AUS-BKK some time in late August or September, and I have about 165K Chase UR points I'd like to use for the tickets (I know that's not enough for two round trip tickets, but I'd like to offset some of the cost with them).

I guess one option is to buy two economy tickets and try to get two upgrades to business, but it seems that upgrade availability is iffy... so I was looking into getting one award ticket and paying for the other ticket.

Any advice on the best way to do that? My understanding is that it's not possible to do that on one PNR, so I have to book them separately. My approach so far has been to go to the various airline websites and search for an award ticket, then do another search for a paid ticket and try to find the exact same flights that were found for the award ticket. I haven't always been able to do that though—for example, if I search united.com for award tickets, I get results that include various partner airlines: AUS-SFO on UA, SFO-TPE-BKK on BR; AUS-SFO on UA, SFO-ICN-BKK on OZ; AUS-IAH on UA, IAH-IST-BKK on TK; etc... But when I search for a paid ticket, none of those flights show up. It's basically all AUS-{someplace}-NRT on UA, NRT-BKK on NH; or AUS-{someplace}-HKG on UA, HKG-BKK on CX.

Or any general advice on what to do? I'm open to driving to IAH or DFW if it'll make a significant difference, but I'd prefer to depart from AUS.

beckoa

As the OP is looking at using UR points, we'll move this to the UR forum.

Not sure if Chase has a way to combine a ticket points and miles, those who are in the know of Chase can confirm either way.

~beckoa, co-moderator Information Desk

dukerau

ITA Matrix is the best resource for this. Use the advanced controls fields, and in the routing codes, pop in the flight numbers you find award availability on. For example, I found AUS-IAH-IST-BKK available on 9/7 in business with return on 9/14 BKK-PEK-IAH-AUS. So search on ITA matrix AUS-BKK round trip 9/7-9/14, and in routing codes, put in (without quotes): "ua281 tk34 tk64" for the outbound and "ca980 ca995 ua1739" for the return. Price: $14,383 (youch).

You'll find that often award availability doesn't mean cheap cash cost, as the example above shows. Also, you may notice that some routes aren't available for purchase. United's award rules can be more lax than what cash purchases allow. For example, I couldn't get your AUS-LAX-TPE-BKK on UA-BR-BR to return a price.

You'll probably find better fares if you do the same airline each way (except domestic connections on United - those are ok).

bgriff

You are correct that you won't be able to have the two bookings on the same PNR, so yes, it will require some manual legwork on your part.

I would recommend booking the award flight first when you are ready to book, because airlines are always dynamically monitoring inventory, so it is possible that booking either one could affect the availability and price of the other one. But the risk of a price increase is probably greater for the award ticket (where the next price level could be double the starting price), so better to book that one first.

As for finding the same flights, the problem is that there is more limited availability for awards than for cash flights, so the award search engine is showing you more obscure options. The easiest thing to do would be if you can find a routing where the first flight is longhaul international, like flying EVA on IAH-TPE-BKK. (There aren't any Star Alliance longhaul flights out of AUS so you'd have to go to IAH for this.) Then you could buy the same-flights cash ticket directly from EVA, and EVA's website will almost certainly show you a simple routing like that without any difficulty.

The United advanced search options do let you specify which airports you want to connect in, so you may be able to use that to force the same routings to come up, but I don't know how reliable it is. You could also try calling United and asking them to price out cash fares on the multi-stop itineraries, but they may be much more expensive in some cases, because the cash fares would be optimized for more direct/obvious routings (where in this case award seats aren't available).


Finally one other thing to think about: business class tickets for flights departing from the developing world can be much cheaper than the same flights when departing from the US. So it could be worth doing a bit of research on whether using miles for 2 one-way tickets US->BKK and using cash for 2 one-way tickets BKK->US might be a better option as well. Could also be worth checking cash prices starting from a few other airports in the region, for example I have seen some very cheap one-way HKT->US premium cabin fares before, so if you find something appealing you could consider adding a few days in HKT to your trip, or even just buying a cheap short-haul ticket to get you there for your international flight (though if you do that, make sure you leave enough time in HKT to account for any possible delays in the short flight).

Dahan

Thanks for the advice! I ended up finding what I wanted on SQ (departing from IAH), although I didn't have enough points for an award ticket (164k vs 184k), so I paid $800 for the 20k top-up. Hopefully it was worth it, but in any case, it's all done and paid for