Future booking advice

Hi all
Having read some of the recent posts regarding spending air miles with partners I wanted to ask a few questions

I am looking at saving air miles to fly to Sydney in a year or two. I planned on using Virgin but since losing the route had to look at other options. I thought about going via Dubai and connection or maybe via LAX and picking up a virgin austraila or delta flight but still want to use miles to upgrade to upper/first.

Does anyone have any suggestions, thoughts, best route ideas.

Just want to gauge options now rather than saving 400k air miles and not be able to apply them

Matt

My experience was pretty bad, alas...

I tried to do exactly the same thing (ex-NYC), and it was almost impossible to get a partner redemption (found one business seat on Virgin Australia in one direction only ex-LAX).

Delta and Air New Zealand had flat unavailability to/ex-SYD on ALL flights in the month of October. And this was with me searching 10-11 months ahead of travel.

Virgin Australia had very marginal availability in economy and one seat, mentioned above, in business; but their usage of VS miles for redemptions is a bit of a rip-off in my opinion.

In the end I burned up all my KE miles, and flew Korean Air (First Class, half the journey on their A380!!) via Seoul. Amazing product!

People have been known to get VS partner redemptions to/from Sydney, but it's really not a great route. VS partner redemptions on the whole are not the easiest anyway, as I'm sure you've worked out.

You might look at flights into Melbourne or Brisbane, and then taking a cheap Virgin Australia flight to Sydney...

I've tried numerous times to get to Australia (any entry point) using my FC miles on VA and NZ to no avail ( the miles redemption rate with VA is very poor IMHO too as indicated by NYLON ).
Now that VS have ditched SYD you could consider using VS to HKG and then another carrier to Oz ( don't know if you've any BA Avios as that's an onward option with CX from HKG ?)
DL

I keep thinking that with the new tie-up DL will open up more ticket stock for VS mileage redemption, but...

A friend flew VS UC to LAX, then Fiji Airways Business Class to SYD via Nadi. A long way to do it, but got some very cheap revenue fairs on Fiji Air, which has some brand new planes and the Business Class product is pretty good, apparently.