I just redeemed my first ever award ticket. The miles I used were from the post about triple dipping on buying miles where I bought 100,000 US Airways miles for $1881.25. We all of my activity on chasing the points, I did not have enough United Miles.
I researched all of my flights on United and jotted all the pertinent details to feed into the US Airways agent. As has been documented by various bloggers, View From The Wing and One Mile At A Time, about hanging up and calling again, I was prepared. Side note on when not to hang up and call again from The Wandering Aramean.
The automated machine took most of the details and populated it correctly to the agent. He had mentioned he saw a flight on Singapore metal to Hong Kong from JFK. That piece was interesting to me because I did not see that on United.
I was able to book the entire flight that I had wanted, including a flight where United had scared me that there would be no business class available.
When searching alone, on DEN to EWR availability was present.
The only issue I had was the agent saying my itinerary was not valid,JFK-TPE-HKG then NRT-DEN-EWR.
Courtesy of gcmap.com
With this routing, the agent pushed back and kept insisting that this route was a double jaw and was against the US Airways rules. I couldn’t remember the term for most of the conversation and had to Google that it EWR, JFK, and LGA are all co-terminals and it should not be considered as such. I disagreed with him and he relented and placed me on hold and said he was checking the rules and will attempt to book. When he came back he gave me all the details of the cost.
From HKG to NRT, I plan on transferring some Ultimate Rewards to British Airways for a business class ticket would cost 20,000 Avios to fly on Cathay Pacific metal.
