I'm based in the US and wanted to take a vacation in Australia sometime in the first half of next year. I knew it would be tough to use miles, as there's very little capacity in the US-Australia market. That being said, my dates were flexible and I was not too bothered about where in Australia (or New Zealand) I ended up...
I have lots of miles on AA and VS and thought it would be easy to use miles from either of these programs. Qantas is a OneWorld member along with AA; Air New Zealand partners with VS FC.
The options with VS sucked. Essentially, I couldn't get from BOS to AKL unless I was prepared to use two awards - which would have totalled way too many miles (I was looking to fly at the front of the bus!).
AA showed no availability from January right through to the end of April. The dates they had after that were not very convenient.
I was scouting around and then found that CO's OnePass program allows redemption on QF too. So, I called up the partner desk and lo-and-behold found a very nice scheduled from BOS-LAX-SYD (to include a few days in MEL too), in First all the way.
There's a lot of irony here. AA is a partner of QF, CO is not. AA couldn't get me a seat, CO could. CO's First Class award on QF is 135,000 miles (very reasonable I thought!). AA's First Class award on Qf is 145,000.
I have lots of miles on AA and VS and thought it would be easy to use miles from either of these programs. Qantas is a OneWorld member along with AA; Air New Zealand partners with VS FC.
The options with VS sucked. Essentially, I couldn't get from BOS to AKL unless I was prepared to use two awards - which would have totalled way too many miles (I was looking to fly at the front of the bus!).
AA showed no availability from January right through to the end of April. The dates they had after that were not very convenient.
I was scouting around and then found that CO's OnePass program allows redemption on QF too. So, I called up the partner desk and lo-and-behold found a very nice scheduled from BOS-LAX-SYD (to include a few days in MEL too), in First all the way.
There's a lot of irony here. AA is a partner of QF, CO is not. AA couldn't get me a seat, CO could. CO's First Class award on QF is 135,000 miles (very reasonable I thought!). AA's First Class award on Qf is 145,000.
