mtkeller

What class was the agent looking for? Trans-Tasman aircraft are two-cabin with economy and premium economy service. Domestic aircraft are two-cabin with economy and business service. The booking class for premium economy award seats is P. It used to be that they booked these into Z like they did for long-haul sectors, but with the Sabre transition, VA has these now booked into P.

Check out of BNE. I'm seeing BNE-WLG available in P near end of schedule. SYD-AKL, not so much.

Anything KVS found you could have found yourself for free on DL.dumb. For VA, sign up for their Velocity Rewards program (just find some address in Australia to use for your address) and search for reward seats. It matches what DL can see pretty reliably, at least for short-haul.

dwcatty

Not a biggie but works for me. Booked a r/t AVL-ATL-STT and back the week before Easter for 35k miles and $15. Flying on Mondays, good connections, really could not have asked for much better. Booked this morning.

Only thing...I'm in a dreaded B seat on the ATL-STT leg, and there are 14 empty seats up front. What is my best timing for trying to snag a window or aisle when folks start getting moved up?

mtkeller

Elite upgrades start at 1700 six days prior to departure for DMs and PMs. GMs are four days out, and FOs are two days out.

Autolycus

I believe you have to search V Australia account. Create one with the Opera House or your favorite hotel as your address. Make sure to select profile any options you can to prevent the address from having to deal with physical mail. Then you should be good to go.

mtkeller

Better yet, make your address the address of the VA headquarters

nathanielm

4 people in business class almost all the way to the Maldives. PDX-SFO-CDG (stopover)-DEL on AS, AF. Then paid travel DEL-MLE. Then return MLE-CAN-YVR-PDX on china southern/AS. Tried for Malaysia Airlines via LAX on return and Malaysia rejected every request we tried even though they were showing availability on expertflyer and their website.

wco81

What time of the year for the SFO-CDG segment?

nathanielm

December. Pretty much wide open from SFO and LAX to CDG starting in late October. You can see available dates on the airfrance.us website. Anything that shows $447.70 for taxes is an AF flight and should be bookable on delta.com.

mtkeller

Most things that show on AF.us are not bookable with SkyMiles anymore. However, ExpertFlyer does show a good amount of west coast-CDG space opening up in mid-November.

wco81

Starting in mid-November or just in mid-November.

Hoping that DL and AF/KLM sort out whatever differences they were having.

mtkeller

I didn't check extensively. Grab an ExpertFlyer account and check it out.

JBJ2435

I don't know if this is considered 'successful', but I'm a happy flyer!

LAX-JFK-MAD-MAD-JFK-LAX first/business class, all lie flat seats except the domestic reurn, for 150k miles mid April. The 1st segment in EC. I've had this on hold for 2 days, checked this morning, same flight was 325K! Yikes

nathanielm

expertflyer is mirroring what is showing on airfrance.us as long as you are looking at the specific air france flights which is why I mentioned the taxes. If airfrance is showing lower taxes, that would be an Alitalia, Aeroflot or Aeromexico flight which are not bookable on delta.com. For all the dates I checked, the airfrance flights are bookable on delta.com.

And when you search on delta.com, make sure you sort by "miles per passenger" on the top right of the results. The airfrance flight will not be shown on page 1 of the results.

mtkeller

Counterexample: af.us shows AF65 LAX-CDG available on 16 Oct 13 and AF66 CDG-LAX available on 31 Oct 13 (biz both directions). EF shows no O space on these flights. They are also not visible on DL.dumb. Same phenomenon for AF65 on 29 Oct 13. Just because you got lucky and found flights that show on af.us and also show on EF/DL.dumb does not mean that things match up. Rather than hunting and pecking to see what's actually bookable, it just makes good sense to search EF.

Bowgie

Thanks, I took your advice. Still can't find SYD-NZ anywhere in early January. Not worried. I can wait for inventory to be added later.

If my time is money, KVS has been worth it just so I don't have to screw around with DL.com

As an example, a few weeks ago, I search for biz class LAX-SYD on Jan 4. Needed two seats. KVS show one (and only one) on Delta and one (and only one) on VA. The Delta flight leaves 2 hours after the VA flight. No problem. I book myself for the Delta flight on Delta.com. Afterwards, Delta.com still shows "green". Great! I'll book wife on the same Delta flight. Select flight, go to purchase. ERROR -- no longer available! Well, duh. Back to search again, find the VA flight, book, done.

This proves to me that Delta.com is not updating its award inventory in real time.