I'm having trouble finding the best award route to the Samoas.

I see Air New Zealand flies to Samoa, Fiji Air flies to Samoa, or Hawaiian Air flies to American Samoa. Those appear to be all the choices for actually getting there and back.

I personally fly out of CVG or anywhere in that 2 hour area (SDF, IND, CMH, DAY). I can get to the west coast if it is required to make the award work. I have 2 years to make the points I need appear in whatever program will work. I will fly any class. I am just not yet familiar enough with all the award charts and partners and such to know if it is easy to fly to HNL then PPG with Hawaiian, or if it might be cheaper to go to Australia with a stopover in the Samoas, or some other plan. Any advice is appreciated and that includes directing me to the correct forum if you have to. I didn't see much info in the South Pacific forum. I will continue searching for "Samoa" in the various sub-forums in the meantime.

Thanks.

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Since aa.com now supports award bookings on HA, you can do test bookings to PPG on aa.com, and see what comes up. Does HA fly HNL-PPG every day, or only on certain days of the week?

Note that, with AA awards, the over-water carrier must have a published through-fare from origin to destination. If HA does not publish such a fare from any of your originating city possibilities, then AA will charge you for two separate awards.

In two years, the AA and US FF programs will be merged. HA might not still be a partner.

IMO it would be safer to investigate using *A miles, perhaps UA, to get NZ flights to Samoa.

Have you checked on the difference between Samoa and American Samoa in terms of visa requirements, any health requirements, etc.?

The plan is to visit both, so flying into either is fine. Interisland transport is another issue for another day.

It looks like VISA requirements for Americans are pretty straightforward in both locations.

And this is where my skills are weak. I cannot make UA find me a flight from CVG to PPG, so how would I search *A otherwise?

AA comes up with 75k miles and $22 for this round trip using HA and it is only flying in on 4 days and out on 2. But that is easy to plan around. That is also for mid-December, and of course we are looking to hop the date line if possible and celebrate the first AND last New Years celebrations. Which may or may not be possible, which is again, another issue I can deal with later.

Thanks for your help.

Looks like Virgin America can get me there for 45000 pts, round trip from LAX. Requires a positioning flight, but is at least an option.