need help with award planning
 

Hello everyone, 2nd time posting here. :-) My first post was several months ago. I got great advice on how to get enough points for our dream vacation. Thanks for all the help, I now have successfully acculated enough miles for 2 economy award tix which we plan on using Lax-mad and ath-lax for the month of june 2012.

My planned itinerary would first be Lax-mad. We are taking a tour from Gate1travel that would take us from Madrid to barcelona in 7 days. But that leaves us in barcelona to athens on our own.

I have been looking at flights from BCN to ATH and it is priced at least 800 euros.

My questions are:
1.How long is the maximum days you are allowed to stay in a stop over?
2. I have tried being creative and looked at awardnexus and co website to see if there are possibly flights that both stop at madrid or barcelona prior to athens but I have not found any.

Any suggestions would be great. Thank you.

JB

What is your FFP(Frequent Flyer Program?) The cheapest fare for BCN to ATH is Spanair or Vueling both cost about C$200 one way.

I am with Asiana sorry I forgot to mention that.

I will definitely look into those airlines. Thank you

I would call Asiana's program people and see if that routing is legit, that is sometimes some fall into the backtracking crap and that may not be allowed. They may get you what you want.

We took the AVE train from BCN to MAD and it was just amazing, we booked in advance and got a great rate in the 2nd class cabin and were even served breakfast.

OP, looks like your trip is perfectly suited for the distance-based Asiana (OZ) award chart.

Here is a typical routing for your trip:

LAX-FRA-MAD
(open jaw)
BCN-ATH
ATH-FRA-LAX

Which comes at 14781 flying miles, and will price out as 78K OZ miles per person in economy. In fact, your BCN-ATH is going to be free, because adding it doesn't cause you jump to a higher mileage level.

Stopover duration is not limited, as long as your ticket is valid. In addition to 5 stopovers, the OZ rules also allow for 1 open jaw, which you can use in your MAD-BCN segment.

You can see more of the rules here: http://us.flyasiana.com/Global/US/en...?fid=CLUB16210

Since you are already using Award Nexus, I suggest you use the Route Explorer tool to figure out routes for your segments (LAX-MAD, BCN-ATH, and ATH-LAX) and also the Distance Pricer to price out the routes found by the Route Explorer.

Once you have researched your desired routes, then you can start searching for awards for those route segments.

You should use the ANA tool isntaead, it searches for segment-to-segment availability- allowing for a lot more flexibility and precision with routings and everything.

Thanks CK, I didn't know I was allowed to have that extra flight from
BCN to ATH.

Thanks Bel, I recently opened an account with ANA. Since I have no mileage in the account I need to kearn how to "trick" the program
Into allowing me to see flights.

Two options:
1) There is a greasemonkey script that helps: http://boardingarea.com/blogs/thewan...earch-problem/
2) Search for GMP-HND on ANA and then scroll down where you'll see the option for *A partners becomes available.

Also, AwardNexus will query the ANA site as one of its sources so if you prefer that interface use it.

Alternative, you can Continental.com which has a similar award search (which can also look for complete trips along with segment by segment seraches), but there are some caveats- for example Continental doesn't search for Air China or Swiss availability.