whitethunder

If you are not leaving the airport, ie only in transit, and use hand sanitizer etc I see any risk relatively low

I at least booked my return PM SIN-SFO flight which gives me all day to get there from HKT and only have three hours in the airport in SIN.

I am not worried in the slightest.

Kacee

On UA/NH, sure. That's one of the reasons I got off that merry-go-round.

BR and QR offer one-ways in the $500-600 range.

Graciecatt

I'm looking for the best way to book business class flights RT from LAX - BKK using Chase UR. I started looking on United's website thinking I would transfer my points to UA and then utilize *A airlines.

I chose sample dates of 1/5/21 - 1/19/21 which was the furthest out I could book on United's website.

I found Business Saver flights LAX - TPE (Eva Airways BR5) and TPE - BKK (Thai Airways TG635) for 90K. Then a return flight also Business Saver BKK - TPE on Eva Airways (BR206) and TPE-LAX (BR6) also for 90K plus $48 in fees total for both.

Is 180K points booked through United the best I can do for business both ways? Are there other tricks like booking through a different airline website other than UA or transferring points to and different airline other than UA that would cost less than 180K miles for business? I really want to avoid mixed cabin awards.

Kacee

That's the cheapest available through UA. It's cheaper through AV or AP. Both have substantial limitations on the customer service side which you should consider carefully before transferring points (in fact, I'm not sure if AP is fully functional yet after AC took it back over).

If you can, book the BR-BR connection rather than TG. BR has a better hard product and TG has a nasty habit of using bus gates at BKK. That said, if you can score the one-stop saver J with BR for the long-haul, you've done well, even if the TPE-BKK segment is on TG.

EmailKid

I've been looking at BKK reward tickets for a while, and the only way you can score 75K miles is if partner flight is in coach. So the only "short" final leg is via HKG, and I have found only ridiculous flight time So for all intents and purposes, 90K it is.

EDIT to add: SIN is also a short flight, but UA web site has never offered me a Biz flight to SIN and connecting coach flight to BKK, which I would probably do to save 30K miles on a roundtrip ticket.

jsloan

For a while, the actual rule was that intra-regional flights could be in J, and if you were on UA metal for the inter-regional flights, you’d get the UA saver price for the whole thing. So, UA I/IN space to HKG or SIN, and you’d be able to take J to BKK for no additional miles. Of course, you can also do this with the Excursionist Perk. However, if you ended up transiting somewhere else (e.g., China, Taiwan, Korea), then the last leg would make a material difference — you’d get the partner J fare for the whole trip because the last leg was inter-regional.

That said, with the new all-dynamic system, there’s already been some evidence that UA is working to increase the fares for partner flights, including possibly charging extra for flights operated by certain partners. I don’t know if they’ve backed off of it for now — I haven’t seen any reports in a couple of weeks — but it’s coming. I suspect 180K RT will look like a steal by this time next year.

OP: Price actual business class tickets from LAX to BKK for your preferred dates, and compare the cost through the Chase Ultimate Rewards portal to the number of MileagePlus miles required. If you have the Chase Sapphire Reserve, 180K points is worth $2700 in travel. If you can find a $2200 ticket for the dates that you want, you’ll come out way ahead. There are no guarantees, but it’s possible.

Kacee

I agree we should always check for discount paid business class, but LAX-BKK for $2200 is not going to happen except on a Chinese carrier or possibly PR. Sometimes JL/AA/CX will price around $3k.

paperwastage

JL/AA has been pricing around $2976 on some days

180k Chase UR is equivalent to USD $2700 cash fare. i'd seriously be debating that

Kacee

Yes that would be "around $3k"

BR J is superior to JL J IMO. You also have to look out for the 5+ hour layover in TYO on the outbound. Plus they're all afternoon departures with a late night BKK arrival, which I avoid whenever possible.

Ironically I am typing this from JL708 BKK-TYO on my way to LAX. While I love JL's F product, I'd rate their J product well below other top Asian carriers.

hirohito888

JL has pretty terrible connectivity to BKK. NRT-BKK has been 787-8 for the longest time (to switch to 767 in 29MAR20, but that's not much better).

And JL LAX-HND (starting 29MAR20) results in a 7h stopover to connect to HND-BKK.

So a choice of either bad seats or bad schedule.

cesco.g

Did you try to actually book these BR flights? I have been trying to book a BR TPAC award flight for over two weeks and am always getting an error after the payment page.
On another date I have actually been able to book BR C-award tickets - just to receive a message some 36 hrs later that UA was unable to actually issue the tickets. The latter happened twice already.
Bottom line: I have not been able to book a single BR C award in the Dec/20, Jan/21 time frame sofar.

Hope, you got more luck in your endeavour!

econ

QR just recently had this available for around $2.5k. One can do much worse than Qsuites getting to SE Asia. (picking up a bunch of AA EQDs doesn't hurt either )

Graciecatt

i did not actually try to book ans thank you for your insight. That's a little scary you are unable to book. I was experimenting to see if I could figure out what was the best transfer/least points to advise my daughter on her options so she'd have a sense of how many UR points she has to have to make this work. She isn't into the points and miles game enough to know how to book partner awards and I'm still/always learning myself. When she comes up with hard dates, I'll be back here making sure I understand the best connections and products/airlines to fly.

omg my daughter would love another QSuites trip. We came home from Egypt that way and it was amazing. That is not a bad price for sure and would help to earn future AA miles. Maybe someday they'll be a transfer partner of Chase or Amex. I got the Barclays Red and Citi AA cards just for the bonuses that got us home from Egypt so I think I've maxed out my opportunity to get AA miles.

Graciecatt

i have the CSP and the Ink Preferred so only 1.25 points for me.

I am not savvy enough with booking partner award flights to completely understand your first paragraph. I have heard of UA's excursionist perk but am unsure how I'd apply it. If you could explain this like I'm 5 years old, I would appreciate it. 😀

thank you. This is the kind of information I'll need when my daughter nails down her actual dates. I need to learn all I can to help her make the best decision not just in using points/miles to the best redemption but also with best hard products, layovers, and routing/airports.

jsloan

That makes a MileagePlus redemption relatively more valuable -- the break-even point moves to $2250. (If the fare is higher than this, you get a better value by moving the points to MileagePlus than buying the ticket in the rewards portal).

Sorry. The current state of the MileagePlus redemption world is very much in flux. Prior to November, UA had three award charts: two (saver and "everyday") for United-operated flights and one for partner-operated flights. The partner flights were in between saver and everyday prices. To figure out which of the charts applied, you had to know the MileagePlus regions involved in the trip. Thailand is in the South Asia region, along with Hong Kong and Singapore -- but China, Japan, Korea, and Taiwan are all in different regions (Japan is its own region; the others are in North Asia). The practical effect of this was that if you could find a Saver business class award on a UA-operated flight to HKG or SIN, you could book all the way to BKK in J for the lowest rate; but if you could only find UA-operated flights to TPE or ICN, e.g., you'd have to pay more miles.

The Excursionist Perk only comes in if you wanted to add an additional destination in the South Asia region -- but if you found Saver space on the UA-operated flight to SIN/HKG, and the computer wasn't pricing the connection properly to BKK, trying multi-city search (and thus using the excursionist perk) might help.

Unfortunately, in November, the MileagePlus system became fully dynamically priced -- there are no longer any charts. So far, most observations are that the separate inventory still exists, and the old charts are being used in certain circumstances -- but UA appears to be in the process of changing things, and I don't think any of us really know what the program will look like 6 months or a year from now.

Hope this is a little clearer.