@crimson12, thanks for the link and apologies for not googling. I should have known how many miles it takes.

There is also some good information over at MilePoint about booking award tickets. May be a little outdated but it still contains a lot of good information.

http://milepoint.com/forums/threads/...rum-more.8684/

I love KVS because I don't have to toggle between different airline websites.

I started scanning CX availability for a trip a couple weeks out, and woke up early at 331 days out and scored the tickets I wanted for December.

Good luck!

How about AwardNexus
 

I notice no one mentioned Awardnexus.com. It is a free and works much like ExpertFlyer and KVS except it only does award searches. There are paid versions which offer more functionally, but if you are a newbie it is a good tool to help you start looking for award availability across all 3 Alliances and a few extra airlines. You have a limited number of searches when you first signup, but the free version should give you enough functionally to look for city pairs across multiple Alliances.

I try book tickets for my big trips 300-330 days out. I've had the best luck with super early bookings. Yes, I might get some award availability later on, but I just want to plan it, and be done with it.

It really depends where and when you want to travel. If you're locked into school calendars and want Hawaii at Xmas or Europe in the summer you need to plan as early as possible. Off peak season and destinations are much easier. We have found AA and oneworld partners to work very well and are able to avoid BA and their surcharges. The more flexibility the easier.

Important point. I get my tickets a year ahead of time because I like to travel right after Christmas every. That's peak season everywhere.

I use Award Nexus. For the past 2-3 years, we've booked two major award trips per year instead of a lot of smaller ones. So their points system for the free version works fine for me.

Last year, I had a large, intricate award trip...multiple partners, multiple countries in Asia...planned close to 330 days out on Oneworld. Then, 5 days before the trip, we junked the whole thing, redeposited the miles, and flew an equally-intricate award trip the opposite direction around the globe using Star Alliance miles.

So my Oneword 330-day experience was good. And my last-minute Star Alliance experience, using US miles as a US Gold member, was also good. :D

Ended up using the BA Avios for Europe this summer. Availability was good in November (so 250-ish days)...many dates were wide-open for ORD-DUB and BOS-DUB, although we had to buy paid tickets onward to the continent from there.

Congrats and enjoy your CX Award!

One thing I haven't seen mentioned is AA (and United) have 12.5K mile one way flights available.

This is good as it lets you grab a one way flight the day they are available as opposed to waiting for your departure and return flights to open up for you to book R/T. Award seats can disappear during that time.