Questions and Answers

I’m in the process of planning a vacation for this spring and I’m a bit lost down the rabbit hole of open-jaw booking rules. The ticket I am interested in booking is business class open-jaw NYC-SJD and then LAX-NYC. If I could somehow add the SJD-LAX flight into that itinerary it would be great, but it looks like the only nonstop options on my dates (May 2017) are American, Delta and Alaska and I’m thinking Star Alliance may be the way to go. Will probably just pay cash for that leg, which is under $200. I have plenty of Chase UR (over 400K), and then smaller amounts of Citi TY (75K) and Starpoints (40K).

If I use Singapore on United, can I not open-jaw this because SJD and LAX are in different zones? Could it work as an open-jaw directly through United? Although there is no nonstop SJD-LAX on United, could I engineer SJD as a stopover and then fly to LAX with a connection at IAH? Looking on the United website there isn’t Saver level availability on my dates, but there is Standard. I don’t think Standard would be worth the points (I think it would be like 100K RT?) given that we can do the whole trip in economy for about $650 cash each.

Any other ideas would also be appreciated!

Well, if there isn’t Saver availability, you wouldn’t be able to use Singapore points either. I’m also not sure business class is a good deal to Mexico in general, given that it’s just a typical domestic-first product, and the flights are all pretty short.

But sure, you can combine whatever segments you want on a United award, you just pay for each portion separately. You can connect as many times as you like though, and the saver pricing would be as follows:

NYC > SJD 17.5k economy / 30k business
SJD > LAX 17.5k economy / 30k business
LAX > NYC 12.5k economy / 25k business