Questions and Answers

I am planning a trip in Dec 2017: MSP-KHI, KHI-SYD, and SYD-MSP. All of those in business or first class.

What would be the recommended mileage redemption? Book one roundtrip with stopover? Book three separate oneways?

Starting to build SPG balance, as I assume that would be the most useful for this! 🙂

Also, would prefer to avoid Turkish when going MSP-KHI, if possible.

How about United Miles? Might be able to get creative on the routings if you can find space.

Alaska is having a mileage sale though and you can route SYD-HKG-SFO/LAX/YVR-SEA-MSP with a stop in HKG for 60k points in Business. That’s [I]phenomenal[/I] .

Thanks for the suggestion. Unfortunately, I don’t have United miles to book as yet.

Is KHI a valid stopover if booking MSP-SYD r/t on UA?

If you can find saver space segment by segment and spoon feed it to a United agent, they may able to price it at the US-Australia rate of 80k per person one way in business. However, MSP and KHI arent the greatest airports for an easy routing. Try:

United MSP-SFO/EWR
Air China SFO/EWR-PEK-KHI
Thai KHI-BKK-SYD

[USER=1349]@Fez[/USER]–there are a couple of resources to look at mileage costs:

[URL]http://www.milez.biz/en/index.php[/URL]
[URL]http://www.travelcodex.com/award-maximizer/[/URL]

where you can start looking at various costs. SPG probably gives you the most options for conversion with the caveat that the status of the program is a little bit uncertain over the longer term due to the merger.

You can also try and reverse engineer the itinerary by looking at which airlines fly to KHI ([URL]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jinnah_International_Airport[/URL]) and seeing what partners you can use for them.

Just a note that the current stopover system is only valid through September on United. Going forward, they’ll have that dumb Excursionist Perk, which we don’t know the “in-practice” details of yet.

[USER=29]@David W[/USER] Do you mean I could possibly have MSP-EWR-PEK-KHI, KHI-BKK-SYD, SYD-HKG-SFO-MSP for 160k UA in Y?

[USER=79]@Gaurav[/USER] I checked awardhacker.com for the three oneways individually and found different options. I am looking to get creative with stopovers 😉

Based on [URL=’https://www.united.com/web/en-US/apps/mileageplus/awards/travel/awardTravel.aspx’]United’s pricing[/URL] for economy travel

US to Central Asia MSP-EWR-PEK-KHI is 42500
Central Asia to Australia KHI-BKK-SYD is 35000
Australia to US SYD-HKG-SFO-MSP is 40000.

Total 117500 per person in Economy. Though like [USER=7]@Tiffany[/USER] says changes are coming and dont know how that impacts award routing.