A friend who lives in London is planning his honeymoon to Hawaii in June. Not being an FTer and finances restricted to Y, he thought that he’d just buy two tickets on AA LHR-LAX-HNL-LAX-LHR (perhaps stopping over to visit friends in LAX on the outbound) currently around Ł800 (GBP).

So I was thinking how much more would it cost to make life a little more comfortable. Some of the options that I thought might work include:
- DONE3 starting in a lower cost country than the UK (they don’t need to return via the US – who flies West from HNL?)
- Buying Y tickets to LHR-NYC and then buying F - KUP (or is it YUP) tickets on AA for the domestic sectors.

Any thoughts or ideas would be appreciated.

As far as OW is concerned only two ways out of HNL - AA or QF. And once you include QF it's a DONE4. Plus if you're on AA from the mainland to HNL you can't go back to the mainland if on a DONE3.

Alect is quite correct about the current Hawaii situation with DONEx fares, however by June 2007 JL will have joined OW making it possible to fly HNL-NRT on JL (so their DONE3 would be something like ARN-LHR-MIA-SJU-LAX-HNL-NRT-HKG-BKK-HEL-ARN and cost circa GBP 3500).

Most of the YUP fares have been converted to KUP but work the same way on AA. Current pricing for JFK-HNL on KUP is USD 2600 and up to USD 5000 (depends on the date). You have to find the right city and dates for those cheap KUP fares, they are not offered on every route and date; hence all the commotion when people find something nice. For example BOS-HNL is USD 1478 for June 18-25. Quite a difference from NYC prices despite being a bit longer flight.

Seems that KUP will be cheaper than DONE3. What's the easiest way to find the best KUP fares to HNL? Thanks

http://www.farecompare.com/search/yupfares.html

Depends if you measure total cost or cents/mile. KUP from BOS-HNL-BOS is 10K miles, a DONE3 is typically over 40K miles. So it is 4x the travel, and valid for a 12 month period.