In the past couple of weeks, there have been a couple of changes that completely alter the picture for getting award seats to The Land Down Under. Let’s check them out, and run through a guide to booking the seats and routing you want. The big changes:
- Citi added Virgin Atlantic as a transfer partner. Now Chase, AMEX and Citi points can all be transferred to VS frequent flyer miles, on top of Virgin Atlantic credit card offers of 55K miles or more! This would be totally awesome if their partners had award seats available without fuel surcharges…
- Virgin Australia eliminated fuel surcharges. Gone, bye-bye! Um, guess where we can put those Virgin Atlantic miles to great use!
- Qantas reduced their fuel surcharges as well. They’re not gone, but they are a little lower.
Alaska Airlines
partners with Cathay Pacific, Delta, Fiji Airways, Korean and Qantas for award travel down under. The main caveat to AS award program is that you can’t combine partners on a single award ticket, so you may have to position using another program (likely Southwest or Avios, or paid tickets) to the airport served by the Alaska partner you’re flying on.
Alaska allows a stopover on one-way travel but not backtracking at the stopover, so you can stop in
- Hong Kong if you fly Cathay Pacific.
- Fiji if you fly Fiji Airways.
- Seoul if you fly Korean. Alaska awards involving Korean must be round trip, and have black-out dates.
- Sydney, Brisbane or Melbourne en route to elsewhere in Australia or New Zealand, if you fly Qantas.
Some of the stopover possibilities, and you don’t have to leave from the West Coast!
None of these award tickets have surcharges when booked with Alaska miles. Award tickets are 40K – 42.5K Alaska miles each way in coach, 55K-62.5K in business and 65K-80K in first class.
Realistically, 2 business class seats are often available on Fiji Airways, and the best chance for family travel in business class is on Cathay Pacific. Coach seats are widely available on pretty much all of these routes.
American
partners with Cathay Pacific, Fiji Airways, Japan Airlines, Hawaiian, Qantas. Stopovers are not allowed except on Cathay Pacific and Japan, where you must book two award tickets to get to Australia anyway. I guess the same is true of Etihad if you want a Middle East or India stopover and the looong way around!
On Fiji, Hawaiian and Qantas, award tickets are 35K AA miles each way in coach, 62.5K in business class and 72.5K in first class. Availability on Fiji and Qantas is the same as when using Alaska miles: there’s lots of it in coach, some on Fiji business class and very little on Qantas business and first class. Availability on Hawaiian varies widely and unpredictably, but you can watch for it on aa.com. Both Hawaiian and Fiji Airways have reclining business class seats, not lie-flat beds.
If anything Qantas business and first class availability will get worse, as redemptions for Qantas own members have gone down in price. Qantas members also have about 3 weeks to book between when their booking window opens 350 days out and when AA’s booking window opens 331 days out.
Booking multiple awards via Africa, Asia or the Middle East would cost 55K -80K each way in coach for most possible routings, with the least expensive one being U.S.-North Asia for 25K (off peak) and North Asia-Oceania for 30K miles. These are not a great deal unless you want a stopover, but parts of AA’s chart may be worth looking at if you’re putting together an extended trip. Or if you just have to fly in Etihad’s residence class suite if it’s the last thing you do.
British Airways
only practical partner for travel from the U.S. to Australia or New Zealand is Qantas. The good news: the booking window opens earlier than AA’s, so you may be able to grab some of the few business class seats that do open up. In fact, that can be used as a trick to secure flights that you can later cancel and instantly grab with AA miles.
Since Qantas has changed their fuel surcharges, any searches for Qantas seats on BA’s site do not give the price and give an error message saying you must call to book. I priced out one of the few available Qantas business class seats from the U.S. to Australia (HNL-SYD on 12/4/15), and BA quoted $347 in surcharges, one way.
Delta
has excellent award availability from partner gateways to Australia on Virgin Australia with no surcharges, and good availability on Korean Airlines with surcharges of around $30 each way. Delta award seats within the U.S. tend to be lacking, so you may have to position like we plan to do in November. As I reported in this post there are 9 or more business class seats available on most dates on Virgin Australia if you book 5 or less at a time.
On Virgin Australia and Korean, award tickets are 50K Delta miles each way in coach or 80K in business class. On Delta’s own LAX-SYD flight? Never mind. Most dates are 175K miles in business class each way.
Korean flies nonstop to Seoul from Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, Houston, Las Vegas, New York, San Francisco, Seattle, Toronto and Vancouver as well as Los Angeles, so the total flying time may not be that much longer on KE if you can eliminate domestic flight(s) to LAX.
United
often has more available seats via Asia than what shows up on a search from your home airport to Australia, for a couple of reasons. One, united.com is broken. Second, Singapore flights aren’t displayed. So I like to use Air Canada and ANA websites, as well as searching United for segments. There is a ridiculously large number of possible combinations of United, ANA, Air Canada, Air China, Asiana, Thai, EVA, Singapore and Air New Zealand flights, and no booking engine is going to come up with all of them!
If you have United status, you may see some business class availability on United’s flights to Sydney and Melbourne at 70K miles per person. Without it, I usually only see coach seats, widely available at 40K.
Air Canada’s Vancouver-Sydney route sometimes has business class seats, at 80K United miles per person. Partner business class routings via Asia are also 80K each way in business class or 40K in coach.
You can actually save United miles by adding a stopover in Oceania on your way to or from Australia. Just be aware that complex routings will give United.com a headache and you’ll have to call in to get the job done. And know that any trip that involves more than one connection each way might be a complex routing at united.com.
US Airways
US miles won’t be an option for much longer, but for now they offer the best price in miles for business class travel to Australia via Asia. Just about any combination of AA, Japan Airlines, Qantas and Cathay Pacific flights can be used. Round trip, with a stopover allowed anywhere along (or sort of near) your route, is 80K miles in coach, 110K in business or 140K in first class. You will have to find all of the segments on your own, but once you do you can book whatever the agent is willing for. Once US Dividend miles accounts are merged into AA accounts in the second quarter of 2015, AA rules will apply for these miles. You’ll gain the ability to book one-ways and lose the Asian route to Australia as well as stopovers.
Virgin America
I called Virgin America for a quote on a Dallas-Brisbane routing and got a couple of pieces of bad news. One, that would be two separate awards with the DAL-LAX flight at the going revenue-based price and LAX-BNE at the partner redemption price of 40K Elevate points roundtrip or 25K one way in coach , 60K RT / 35K OW in Premium economy or 80K RT / 45K OW in business class. The second bit of bad news is that VS hasn’t caught up with the fact that VA has eliminated their fuel surcharges, and I was quoted $423.10 for LAX-BNE one-way, or about $395 in surcharges. The agent I talked to hadn’t heard anything about any change to VA fuel surcharges, and we had a nice chat about the news surrounding them. By the time we got done, he was excited about the great deal that this will likely be very soon!
While Virgin America’s co-branded cards have lackluster signup bonuses, if VA surcharges are dropped these points requirements, at about half of any other program, make for an amazing deal. Even better, you could mix and match with Virgin Atlantic and Delta to get multiple seats on the same flights.
Virgin Atlantic
Unfortunately Virgin Atlantic also told me when I called in that a ticket with Virgin America and Virgin Australia segments would be two separate bookings. But, much to the agent’s surprise, the fuel surcharges are gone! I was quoted 94,000 miles and $28.60 for a one-way ticket from Los Angeles to Australia, in line with this chart:
Round trip pricing shown, one-way can be booked for half of the round trip price.
(Thanks to forum member AIM for helping me find this chart!) While Virgin Atlantic does not give us the best the best price in miles, they are probably the easiest miles to get. And again this gives the option to get the whole family all on one flight, in one class, without having to earn half a million or more miles in one program!
We’re excited to see the news of consumers pushing back against nonsensical scammy ‘fuel’ surcharges, and excited to have more potential ways to make Australia and New Zealand award travel possible and comfortable. I didn’t have time or room to include every program, but if I missed a good viable option for family travel to down under please let me know so I can add it!
Disclosure: The credit card linked to in this post is a waste of time for us but might be very useful if Virgin America does drop the non-existent VA surcharges. Please don’t apply for it unless it perfectly fits your family’s needs.
– Kenny
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