Questions and Answers

I have a bank of TY points and my husband and I are trying to get to New Zealand. Is it possible to book flights in business class on American using Etihad Guest Miles? If I’m looking at the award chart correctly, it’s only 62.5K miles each way. Has anyone done this? Is there a way to search for availability, and how difficult is it to find two business class award seats?

Hi [USER=1431]@Melanie[/USER], and welcome!

It’s certainly possible, but in practice American almost never releases award inventory on that route. You can search for saver space on AA.com, or on the Alaska Air website. Etihad should have access to the same inventory.

In practice, I would look at redeeming Singapore miles with a stopover in Singapore. They’ll be more likely to have award space.

Thanks! Can you actually fly US-Singapore-Auckland route on Singapore Airlines? I am based on the east coast, so would the route be US-Frankfurt-Singapore-Auckland? Or would I have to start from the west coast?

Agreed with Tiffany, yet have another idea if SQ doesn’t work out or you can’t get to one of the 4 gateways SQ departs from. You can redeem Star Alliance using TY points transferred to Singapore KrisFlyer. Round trip it’s 195K for business versus about 170K on Singapore after the 15% discount.

However doing the Star Alliance route you can get out from most any North American city and fly to Shanghai (via ANA,United Air Canada) then take Air New Zealand 787 which has frequent availability, or to Tokyo on ANA then Bangkok-AKL on Thai. United is stingy on rewards like American to New Zealand, however Air New Zealand has released rewards out of Houston and LA lately. Or you can just fly Singapore airlines on the international route and connect to one of the gateways using United.

You will still face some surcharges, but Thai and Air New Zealand don’t have them.

I went last month to Auckland via ANA/Thai/SQ and NZ

[QUOTE=”Melanie, post: 21036, member: 1431″]Thanks! Can you actually fly US-Singapore-Auckland route on Singapore Airlines? I am based on the east coast, so would the route be US-Frankfurt-Singapore-Auckland? Or would I have to start from the west coast?[/QUOTE]

I reserved this the other day in First Class on A380 and B777 (4 seat aircraft) for next year, 116,875 plus $450 JFK-FRA-SIN-AKL