What Everyone Ought To Know About Redeeming Miles

Great post Tiffany! I do admit that I am there checking award availabilities when the schedule opens up, so most of the time I do book flights 10 months ahead. Fortunately it has always worked out (so far....). The weird thing is about AA's schedule, that when it opens up right at midnight, you do see award availability, but when you try to book it, it says it is no longer available (like a phantom space). Then 2 hours or so later, when I guess the award inventories are actually loaded into the system, then suddenly they become bookable.

What do you mean about no product being worth the price to Hawaii? You mean it is never worth going to Hawaii with miles? Or are you just saying there are no awesome premium products to Hawaii (form anywhere)?

Flexibility is key. I got to Kazakhstan on miles in first class and business class on Star/Etihad and I am getting to Rwanda on Qatar business class next year (and back with a cheap ex-CAI fare in business class). Miles take you everywhere!

@ chris -- It's a combination of nothing awesome in premium cabins (there is literally one Hawaiian plane that might be an exception), and saver space being exceedingly rare. If you can get a nonstop from the east coast on one of the internationally configured planes it can be worth it, but when you have to connect a few times and everything is recliner-style it's harder to justify.

More here:
• https://onemileatatime.com/why-arent-there-nicer-seats-to-hawaii/
• https://onemileatatime.com/miles-hawaii-first-class/
• https://onemileatatime.com/redeeming-miles-to-hawaii-can-be-tough/

What about the Hawaiian lieflats that you just reviewed?? Or, if you can find that elusive Delta inventory, 45k Skypass r/t is a great deal. Oh, and I got upper deck J on a UA 747 with beds from SFO-HNL last Christmas Day but have no idea how.

That might be another good footnote to your flexibility theme, be prepared to zig when everyone else zags. Ask yourself if you don't mind spending must-attend events like NYE at an airport instead.

Love your posts! I was able to snag some of that JAL space too – love their 787s!

And it's not always aspirational awards but what makes the most sense. I can choose to spend a ton of money to fly my family to SoCal this winter or I can take advantage of DL's current award sale, hard to be an 11k Skymiles RT award ticket.

Extreme flexibility with respect to timing and somewhat to destination.

It is getting harder to game the system. It's a lot like the stock market - plenty of volatility based on thousands of factors. For instance, for a five day period in July, AA severely discounted it's J and Y prices for flights to Europe this fall before raising them again after they filled. Speculation was that flights weren't filling because of the Bastille Day terrorist attacks in France back in June. In this case, it made more sense to use cash rather than miles.

I always keep adequate award flight mileage in inventory and monitor things constantly.

I'll add a comment about Hawaii. I was able to get EWR-HNL lieflat for my honeymoon. Granted, it was incredibly lucky that the only day on the calendar with saver space was the exact day we were leaving on our honeymoon. Obviously UA BusinessFirst isn't the best product out there, but for 80k miles for two for an 11-hour flight in lieflat seats I thought it was an awesome value. It was incredibly relaxing and we arrived refreshed in Hawaii.

I agree though that 40k miles per person would probably not be worth it if we had to connect somewhere and fly in recliner seats. And we did get incredibly lucky to book the seats. But, if you do get lucky, there's definitely a lot of value in that flight.

Delta 611/612 is comfortable enough to/from Hawaii.

Tiffany, thank you for this post! It's refreshing to get good info, not just an endless barrage of credit card signup links. After all, once you've got the points you want to spend them wisely!

I hope to see more articles like this!