number_6

Very prevalent pricing in airline industry to have A-B-C-D cheaper than B-C fare, particularly for fortress hubs. Lots of variants of this, but price and cost of service are thoroughly decoupled in air fares by the legacy airlines.

JamesBigglesworth

I honestly have no idea what is going on with the airline side of it, but I noticed a couple of years back that if I searched outside the hub-hub parameter then I could often find award seating that didn't appear for the hub to hub directly. It's as if the airlines don't consider the segments (which do indeed include the hub to hub flights buried inside them) but just look at origin and/or destination. So yeah, you end up with things like MCO - CHC, with MCO-LAX-SYD-CHC being the actual flight segments. AA seems particularly good for this game.

Regardless of the why, I'm not going to look a gift horse in the mouth: finding award inventory that's otherwise often tricky to find.

Duke787

What dates?

Australia and New Zealand require some finesse with the UA booking engine to get them to show partner options through Asia.

Try booking into WLG, BNE, or MEL. Also try all the cities up and down the West Coast (especially SEA and LAX which have BR/NH/CA flights that might be useful)

Our flight to ZQN next spring ended up being JFK - TPE - BKK - AKL - ZQN in all J except the last leg but I could only force UA to show that if I limited my search to JFK specifically. If I tried to go ex-RDU where I'm based, I couldn't get anything.

SQ is a great option -- free to sign up for account and both AMEX and UR transfer partner. Pretty generous with J space and F is feasible 1 year out (booked for our honeymoon in few weeks ex-JFK approximately a year ago).

Another overlooked option is using AA to fly on QF/JL/CX from OZ/NZ to somewhere in Asia for only 40k/person in J. Then you can use anyone for the Asia -- > leg. We are doing this to get home from our honeymoon because nothing else materialized. So AKL - MEL (QF J, A330) and then MEL - NRT (JL J) which is 40k and then in our case using AS to fly JL F the rest of the way home. Not the most efficient but worth it for a honeymoon IMO.

mandolino

It seems to work the other way round for me - looking for award flights for say, ABZ-MEL, it will show nothing, but I might be able to find ABZ-LHR and LHR-MEL .

Generally though, there are no J awards available Europe-Aus. That is, there are a few (like 2 seats a day on BA?) , but they get snapped up very quickly by people who devote a lot of time and planning to it.

txflyer77

+1 for the Asia route. CX tends to have a fair amount of J award inventory on their TPAC routes and I had no trouble finding space on their HKG-AKL flight.

This routing sounds brutal but I did back-to-back redeyes SFO-HKG-AKL, spending a day in Hong Kong on the way. In the end I had *zero* jetlag. HKG-AKL departs ~10pm and after spending a whole day in HK after the flight from SFO, I managed to sleep all the way to Auckland. The nature of the route keeps your body clock (mostly) in sync, if you can sleep.

glennaa11

have you looked at Korean? You still have a week to transfer UR points to Skypass. KE seems to usually have decent availability on their own flights.

I've only ever had luck booking awards to Australia at end of schedule (like 10 months+ ahead)