Mileage Runs to Hawaii now...
 

Just spoke to a women doing EWR-SFO-KOA-SFO-EWR today for $350 to get her to 1K. She does the 90 minute turnaround at KOA. Pretty amazing price since given I paid over $650 for the SFO-KOA-SFO leg months ago. BTW, she did get CPU'ed on the SFO-KOA flight leaving now. Just wondering how many are doing mileage runs in and out of Hawaii now? Seems like in the past it would have been price prohibitive with other cheaper routes available.

I would love to, but with the introduction of EQDs, all those miles mean nothing for me because I don't spend $$$$$ on every flight.

That $350 price has to be a mistake fare - or not correct/she's mistaken.

I doubt Hawaii in general is a good MR candidate anymore.......

[ EWR/JFK-Hawaii flights have frequently been 350-450~ on UA and AA for the past 2-3 months.

The price is low but not unheard of to the Islands.

The best, for me, was in 2009 with a 2x EQM promo. For around $350, I did EWR-IAH-HNL-IAH-EWR in about 30 hours with 7h on the ground in HNL... more than enough time for some beach time on Waikiki, a swim, a few mai tais at Duke's, dinner and a leisurely evening at HNL before heading back. 21k EQM for that, with no qualifying dollar threshold got me to CO Platinum for the first time. Good days... even if the rest of the world was, at the time, in utter turmoil and financial ruin!

Exactly. What's the point of mileage runs anymore? It's hard to imagine a situation with someone who has spent enough PQD but is short on miles...

That being said, it's a good fare to Hawaii and it's been available for a month or two now at least.

I guess I'll take your word for it - I do fly EWR-HNL a few times a year, and I've never seen sub $500 this year. Even a quick check of September/October dates don't yield me anything sub $500, but I might not be looking at the right dates

Most of the deals are not to HNL, they are to the other islands unfortunately.

Hawaii has some decent fares I've noticed in the past. I've never done it though. I'm still waiting to pull the trigger on the $650-750 fares to Nairobi with same day turnaround! :D

Depends on the travel patterns. One or two work trips in J could cover the PQDs in a hurry but leave someone well short on PQMs. I'm (unexpectedly) over 20k EQDs on AA but still short of EXP this year. It happens.

I've haven't looked at fares in months, but for a while fares between HNL (and possibly other island locales) and YYZ were very good, both Y and F. I have the Chase PP Platinum waiver, and this likely would have been my go-to mileage run had I needed PQM.

My wife and I have both fallen into this, high end J fares for work related trips early in the year quickly got us over the $20K EQD but we still needed miles. Usually within a few months this becomes a non issue and we have not had the need to actually do a "mileage runs".

Ok, imagine this: A person who has say four business trips per year flies SFO-LHR twice in J and (their company) pays $6,000 for each trip. The other two trips are domestic economy short hops.

PQD qualification for 1k met.
Around 44k PQM's earned for the TATL, say another 3k for the short domestic flights..

So, I could easily picture somebody doing a mileage run to bump up to Gold, or if the rest of their flying is domestic, to Plat or 1k. Personally, I've not done a mileage run since before the merger, but I could certainly understand somebody doing one.