Award Ticket Success CLT to IST
 

I am not sure how this happened, but we were just able to book (over the phone) 4 round trip tickets from Charlotte to Istanbul 6/25 - 7/5 for 50K each. I was sure the tickets would be 100K each, but we couldn't use the us air website to book this itinerary. Does anybody know if this is actually correct, a special deal (perhaps a mileage saver?) or what? Is there another place online to book these tickets using award miles? You can't book Istanbul on the us air website as an award ticket although you can as a regular ticket, which is strange.

Award tickets to Europe from North America require 50K miles in Y / Coach. For 80K miles, you could have booked business seats (assuming you could find 4, which is definitely possible).

You booked over the phone because you must be flying another *A airline at least part of the way. Unless I missed something, US doesn't fly to Istanbul, and you cannot book award tickets online if any airline besides US is to be flown.

As another posted pointed out, Europe is 50K on US - actually better than UA or NW!

However, I believe US charges more award processing fees than the others.