Boston to Greece
 

Looking to get from Boston to Greece - specifically Santorini, but Athens is fine too, in August 2014.

I have a plethora of Chase UR, AA, and AMEX points I can use. Would prefer to fly J class. Business class availability using the united.com website looks tough to come by.

I also dont want to pay huge fees (ie fly BA).

Any ideas?

Boston to Greece
 

alas you are booking late for summer 14. my advice would be to find transatlantic award availability on a united partner, and then add a revenue flight into greece, or add on an Aegean award flight. on the return, you may get greater availability if you do an overnight in your transatlantic gateway. for example, an evening flight on Aegean ATH-LHR, and then LHR-EWR-BOS the next morning. United.com won't suggest this option automatically, but should price the same if you do a multdestination search.

First of all, everything flys through Athens in Greece. Second, you can't get to Greece on United, you have to use *A. First time in Greece we flew Austrian Air into Vienna, Second time we flew (last June) we flew Swiss Air through Zurich. Once you are in Europe, it's easy to get into Athens and then use Aegean (with *A) into any of the islands.

The trick in over the Atlantic. We are in ORD and have always had to route through another city. We had good luck routing through Montreal or IAD.

I would trying calling United and seeing if there are any flights available on Austrian or Swiss Air. They don't always come up on united.bomb

You will probably have to make 2 stops before you get to Athens. Just the nature of the beast. Aegean does fly out of Philadelphia.

You don't say how many seats you need. We needed 3 in J, and more than 2 seats are a little more difficult. I generally book about 280 days in advance.

Lufthansa usually has good availability coming back from Europe through Munich or Frankfort.

If you just want one seat I see five days in August with J availability on the PHL-ATH US Airways flight. That's on an A330 with their Envoy suites which I hear is quite nice. For two seats I only see availability on Aug 10 and 11.

Another option is to fly Turkish to Istanbul (IST) and connect to Athens or the islands from there. I see six dates in August with one seat and two dates with two seats on JFK-IST in business class.

I only checked the non-stop flights into that part of Europe from the Northeast that I knew of. If you want to fly farther to connect there are also TK and UA flights to IST from ORD, IAD, and IAH that I know of. Connections in Europe were covered pretty well already, and I'm not as familiar with those.

This is incorrect. PHL-ATH is a seasonal US Airways flight. Aegean has a codeshare on it.

^
In fact, that's the flight I referenced in my post above. One thing to be aware of with this flight is that you, presumably, won't be able to make changes once US Airways exits Star Alliance. There's also, IMHO, a better chance of an aircraft swap is AA/US is operating as one entity by then. I'd still consider it in OP's case because it doesn't get much better than a 280 mile BOS-PHL flight followed by a nonstop to his destination...unless he/she wants a stopover or 23 hour layover at the European connection point.

I tried to get this award last summer, BOS-JMK, and you do not always have to fly through Athens. Air Berlin/Nikki has nonstop flights VIE-JMK a few days a week. Sometimes BA will fly from LGW, and Vueling from BCN. There are a few others like Air One from some Italian cities.. You can ticket Aegean awards on the UA site too, if you do end up going through ATH.

For flights in J, the best availability from BOS for me is usually LH (or LX) since AA left. Note that if can get yourself to DC there are sometimes a lot of awards open on AF to Europe.

I agree with mattp1987 though. The PHL-ATH is a good option if you can get it. Last summer US opened some last minute envoy awards too, so apparently they don't always fully sell it out.