I'm beginning to think finding the Holy Grail or establishing Jimmy Hoffa's final resting place would be easier than booking tickets to Hawaii using my OnePass miles.

I've spoken with 4 different OnePass agents in the last several days, and have received different answers from each one. I'm hoping someone here can shed some light on what I need to do to book the tickets I'm seeking.

My family of 5 would like to fly from EWR to HNL in July 2007. I've been told all of the following by Onepass Customer Service agents:

* July 2007 dates aren't available yet. You need to wait until 345 days before your departure date to book the tickets.

* There's no such thing as a 345 day availablility. It's totally up to the management when those tickets become available.

* Actually, it's more like 330 days.

* You can book for July 2007 anytime you want, but it'll cost you 70,000 miles per ticket each way.

* It'll cost you 70,000 miles each way IF you book the trip as 2 one-way tickets, but you'll be able to reserve the tickets sooner if you do it that way.

* It's 35,000 miles per round trip ticket, but you need to check back every single day to check for availability because we have no idea when it'll come into the system.

Good grief. Advice, anyone??

Thanks in advance!

I think the industry standard is 330 days out.

Besides that I am a newby to CO, but would like to hear about Hawaii booking as I might do that eventually myself.

Welcome to FlyerTalk.

I would focus on your last bullet point. Wait until 330 days and then start checking some dates. Hopefully, you can be flexible with the time you would like to travel. If you are, I think you will have success getting the tickets you want at the 35,000 mile level. Also, if you are an Elite, that might help as well.

When planning a trip to HI in 2003, I didn't even think of using miles at first. I just figured it wasn't possible unless I wanted to use EasyPass (which I didn't have enough for at the time anyway). However, I was able to find standard award tickets for the dates I wanted.... and only 5 months out. I didn't start checking until mid-December for a trip in the beginning of May.

Also, don't forget about Delta and Northwest. If you can't find CO tickets online, start calling and have an agent check those flights for you (NW should come up online but not Delta I think).

Good luck.

I have been looking at the reward charts every day for the dates we want to travel to hawaii. With the new website, I can't find the monthly reward charts. Has anyone found this at the new website?

Puddy, that's encouraging that you were able to get the tickets you wanted 5 mths out...my husband is really worried we'll be locked out of the dates we want. We have a bit of flexibility in terms of departure date, but we're celebrating two special occasions in early July and want to be in Hawaii for those dates.

I will continue to check back here, divilish, and let you know if and when I get the booking.

CO doesn't often release standard award space at the 330-day mark by default. While you can book 330-days out, standard space usually opens within 270 days or so.

Also, think about all the ways to get from the New York area (EWR/JFK/LGA) to HNL using CO partners (mix/match) and up to 1 connection.

If you do this homework ahead of time, it will help in the event you get a less-than-creative agent who checks straight CO only and tells you nothing's available. If you post them here, we can respond with any routes you might have missed.

I know July is a popular time to travel HI, but FWIW, I just checked on reward flights to HNL from EWR for this Sept and Oct, and there is standard reward availability for just about every day. You should be able to find something, especially as Channa says there are a ton of options out of the NYC area either with CO or their partners.

I have the last two Feb's booked 4 standard BF tickets EWR-HNL and had ZERO problems in availability.

Two Feb's ago the availability was insane - 80% of the dates from Jan to Mar were open. Last Feb not as crazy but still good. I just happened to peek at the upcoming Feb the other day and there was still reasonable availability for 4 std BF awards.

Your best bet is to do the following (to almost guarantee availability)....

1) wait until about 6 months out and check then
2) EWR/HNL is a hard one to book - HNL/EWR will be 5 times harder, so get prepared to be flexible with your dates and return routing
3) to maximize your Hawai'i time, do the following:

• the evening before your official 'first day' of the trip, book your flights to go to LAX first and overnight there
• take the LAX-HNL nonstop first thing in the morning, which will get you into HNL before noon and hours before either the IAH or EWR nonstops would - you get an extra day on the Island
• For the return, book HNL-LAX-EWR or HNL-LAX-IAH-EWR and if you are an Elite member, waitlist HNL-EWR and HNL-IAH-(EWR)

I have successfully gotten Standard BF seats to OGG over Memorial Day in January.

More importantly, when CO releases seats is far from predictable. For instance, for travel EWR-PEK, standard BF seats MAY be available ABOUT 330 days out. Yet, for R seats (upgradable with miles), CO tends to batch release these, with 3-4 months being released at a time , anywhere from about 210 to 300 days out. This means you can get a free ticket, but can't buy one and upgrade, which makes no sense. But this is CO! So there may be no R seats avaialble for periods beyond 7 months out, and all of a sudden there are tons of R seats available over a 3-4 month travel timeframe.This means that if your outbound is in one timeframe and you want your return in a later time frame, you are out of luck for several months until the next batch release, by which time, all of the seats from the previous batch are long gone.
SInce I am more interested in R seats transpacific, I tend to montor KVS and see some amazing things that happen with these seats.
I can't directly relate this to standard coach award seats, but it is possible that there is some batch releasing also being done.

OT,speaking of R seats, Friday AM, I booked PHL-IAH-SMF-IAH-PHL for October at $309 RT all in. I checked KVS and there were at least 3-7 R seats on each segment. I called back in the afternoon to use miles (I have tons) to upgrade,and by then virtually all of the R seats were gone (I did book OW outbound, where I got the last PHL-IAH R seat (There were 5 in the AM). Checking KVS I found that the number of R seats had indeed decreased wildly. (THe farewas now 390 as well). I guess it shows you can't put off until the afternoon what you can do in the AM. A lot of problems would be solved if CO would allow display of award seat codes (E,EG,etc).

I'm told that Hawaii is the most often used reward ticket and is the most diffiuclt to get, this via a few folks at CO over the years, I have no actual data to know if this is true or not. So I don't blame you for wanting to book early. The official season for regular rates in Hotels start around June 8th or June 9th they consider that through Aug their high season.

I'm trying to get in for June and I'm told that I have to wait until they change the upgrade codes as they are going from M to GN or something like that for elite members as they are chaning all reward codes to get in line with Skyteam (or some dribble like that).

As I have to book 5 coming from Asia and two coming from the mainland I know your feeling, especially considering I have specific dates for an event that we want to attend and I don't really want to pay for 7 BF flights when I have all these miles.

For me, EasyPass is available now, but Standard Reward won't be available and I was advised to call after Aug. 7th as Rev Management hasn't released it yet. We're looking at an early June arrival and a mid June departure. So by my calculations I'm way over the 330 day rule already but they just aren't releasing it yet or making standard reward available until after their quoted date of Aug 7th. I've gotten this same report from the phone, and I had my station manager try to book them and he got the same response from someone inside CO. I did get an email written explaination cc'd to me from the folks at CO to my station manager explaining the reason they couldn't book it and advising to wait until after 8/7.

I'm assuming you want standard reward and not easy pass. Not sure if this helps you or not but this is what I"m going through and what I'm experiencing. If you want PM me and I'll let you know what I find out and when I'm able to book them etc...

We were able to secure 7 award tickets on the EWR to HNL flight. We leave in three weeks We have to fly out on a Monday and back on the Thursday night flight 10 days later. We booked 9 months in advance. If you stay away from weekend travel, you will have a much easier time.

Joyce, it's encouraging to hear that you were successful. It appears that flexibility on departure dates (as you and several others here have pointed out) play a big part in getting those reward seats. We do have some play there, and could fly out of other NYC airports as well, but EWR is preferable.

Kosrae, one of the agents I spoke with said that I, too, could book the EZPass tickets at any time, but that they require 70,000 reward points EACH way. I'm not willing to use 140,000 points per person with 5 people going.

bocastephen, those are all excellent suggestions! I would rather have a nonstop flight if at all possible, but the LAX stopover is definitely something to consider, given the points you made.

I have never had trouble booking reward tickets. Maybe I am in the minority, but June 1 this year, I booked two Standard BF tickets to HNL for late September, with a stopover (CLE-EWR-HNL-LAX then SAN-CLE). While I am "Elite", it is only Silver, so I don't know if that helped very much. I couldn't book online because of the stopover, but when I called, the CSR bent over backwards to make the trip work. I was able to get the exact dates, and even flights I wanted. (we are celebrating two events also)

I must be the only one with difficulties. I seem to have them every year as I'm always having hard times for when we go. But again, I'm trying to arrange trips from Asia and from USA at the same time to all meet up at specific dates so I'm two strikes right there. Plus I try to mix reward one and onepass at times.