Agreed!
Unfortunately I won't have enough Continental/United until the Months of Miles promotional bonus miles post, which at this rate could be a few more months, haha. Nor do I know my travel availability schedule for far enough in the future to book it yet either. Wishful thinking!

Agreed, what one? I know NZ has a few discount programs

People, you can transfer your UA miles to CO account instantly and as many times as you want for as little as 1 mile or as many as 100K miles or any amount you pick. The miles move instantly and in real time.

Did you guys ever read your emails from the CO/UA airlines to urge you to link both your CO/UA accounts by yourself? The deadline was 12/31/11 but apparently the actual merger of the 2 FFPs now is delayed to Q1 2012 due to some unanticipated technical issues ...

However the transferability has been there for almost a year now.

Also if you pay attention of the STICKIES in CO/UA forum, the latest buzz is OnePass will be the surviving program together with the interface et al - one of the evidences is, CO/UA already officially inform you via multiple emails that the OnePass account number will be the number to use in the future. If you dont have one, UA would create one for you.

Redemption with a baby
 

The OP mentioned doing a business class redemption with a baby. Typically that's going to be a very expensive trip, because the 10% lap child fare will be based on some rediculous undiscounted business class fare. Last time I checked for Australia, the fee for a lap child in business class with 2 award tickets was in excess of $1500 (I'm sure child-hating premium fliers on the forum would argue that is too little!).

Both in terms of availability, and cost, an economy redemption makes a lot more sense to New Zealand. The economy seats on the LA- AKL leg are 33” pitch, with individual TV screens, so nice economy class. It's only a 13 hour flight from LAX to AKL, so I don't really see the issue (but then I just did WAS- SIN RT and LAX-SIN RT in Y two months in a row with two young kids- up to 30 hours one-way with weather delays).

ANZ also has the Skycouch option, which would be good with an infant- I don't know if you can upgrade from a redemption to include the Skycouch (I know you can't get premium economy with a redemption). There’s more info on the Skycouch here-

http://www.airnewzealand.co.nz/economy-skycouch

If you are doing a *A redemption, you should try to add on a domestic leg in New Zealand.

Finally, ANZ has the best inflight safety announcements in the industry, though I don’t know if they still show these- check out the uniforms carefully-

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7-Mq9HAE62Y

Friendly

I just did NZ over Christmas break, got back on Dec 31. My advice is to be extremely flexible with award tix. Unfortunately, I couldn't be that flexible, and it was pretty nerve-wracking waiting until nearly the last minute to see if award seats would open up.

The good news is the Air New Zealand does open up a few J seats within a month or two of departure. I set up alerts with Expertflyer, and it was a great way to snag the one or two seats that eventually opened up. I did see some VERY last minute Qantas award seats in Y for their LAX-AKL direct service, but by then I had already booked my J seats on ANZ.

I'm in the middle of writing my NZ trip report, but I've also written a couple posts about my experience with booking award tix to NZ. I also wrote some tips about booking domestic NZ tix, which can be very expensive. You can read them here:

http://milesglu.blogspot.com/2011/10...w-zealand.html

http://milesglu.blogspot.com/2011/11...kings-new.html

http://milesglu.blogspot.com/2012/01...ip-report.html

That really is amazing, as it costs about that much in miles just to go from Japan to NZ.