Good Morning,
I've been playing this game for about 2 years now, and while my wife and I have used miles/points to take quite a few shorter trips (mostly domestic + some Caribbean, always in coach), we've never splurged and taken a really nice, long trip. For awhile now, we've both been wanting to visit Hawaii for a week+ and I'd really like to try flying business/first for these longer flights. I know it's a high-demand destination, but it seems like lots of people are able to make it work. We'd like to visit Kauai (Grand Hyatt Kauai) and maybe a few days in Maui (Andaz Maui) during the cold months here in Michigan (Nov-Mar). We live in West Michigan, so our home airport is GRR. Ideally, we'd depart on a Fri and return on a following Sat/Sun, but I know that's asking for a lot and we could probably make most anything work (just needs to be ~1 week). Our current balances are as follows:
Alaska Air: 26k
AA: 885k
UA: 147k
US: 70k
WN: 13k + CP
Chase UR: 360k
SPG: 41k
Most of the AA miles have come from 7 Citi Executive approvals between me and my wife, so we'd really like to burn some of those and save the Chase/UA points/miles for other trips. I've found that AA flies direct routes from DFW-OGG and DFW-HNL on 763s instead of 757s out of LAX or PHX. I know the demand for those flights would be very high so I don't know if it's realistic to hope to find 2 business/first seats on one of these flights during the months we'd want to go, especially since we're not ~11 months out anymore.
I proposed this question on FT and the suggestion was to subscribe to EF and set some alerts, but I don't know if I'd use it enough to get enough value out of $10/mo, or if it's even worth it considering whether what I'm after is realistic...? Another question is whether anyone here has a "First Class" membership to WA's Travel Tools, where you can set up 50 different award search alerts which are queried at least 4 times daily. Curious how this works out if anyone's used it, as it's only $15/year.
Anyway, any comments/questions/suggestions/etc would be gladly received and greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance!
Dave