How to Book a Dream Trip to P. Sherman, 42 Wallaby Way, Sydney

Today's post is a guest post from my wonderful girlfriend, Kelsey. As you will see she has always wanted to go to Australia and it's been our dream trip forever. Finally she just decided that it was going to be our next trip no matter what. And let me tell you, when she sets her mind to something...she's going to do it. One of the many reasons I love her. 

But the main reason I wanted her to write up this series of posts is because she was able to use a series of tools to book an outbound trip to Sydney on oneworld and a trip back from Sydney with "layovers" (almost 24 hours each) in both Singapore and Tokyo on Star Alliance. So our routing as it looks now is: Washington, DC - Chicago - Dallas - Brisbane - Sydney - Singapore - Bangkok  - Tokyo - Seattle - Houston - Washington, DC. The outbound is on AA and Qantas and the return is on Singapore Airlines, Thai Airways, ANA and United. 

So...I'll let Kelsey take it from here. 

I had the travel bug long before I met Chris.  I was fortunate to grow up with two parents who loved to travel and wanted me to grow up with an understanding of how many amazing places there are across the globe.  When I took my first flight I was only 9 months old.  In eighth grade I went to China and Thailand, in high school to Costa Rica, and in college to Rome and all across Europe.  The trip of my dreams, however, was always to Australia.  Maybe it’s because I wanted to be a marine biologist when I was 5, or because Finding Nemo is one of my favorite movies.  Whatever the reason, it’s always been my ultimate travel goal, and one I didn’t expect to reach for awhile.  Chris and I investigated going to Australia at Christmas but the availability just wasn’t there, so we filed it away for a “someday” trip.

Turns out, that someday may be much sooner than either of us thought!  We just finished booking our trip to Australia, Singapore and Tokyo for July.  The planning started on a whim, as I wanted to take a big trip over the summer before I start graduate school in the fall.  I asked Chris about Australia, but he scoffed and said it was unlikely we could pull that off. (Editors Note: I don't remember scoffing, but she's usually right so I probably did ;)   He did say that if I really wanted to go that I would have to plan it.  Challenge accepted.  Oh and one more thing, if we were going all the way to Australia, we needed to visit Asia too.  No big deal, right?

Now I’m not a points expert by any means, I just pick up things here and there from being around Chris and JD.  When I want to do something, though, I’m stubborn and persistent.  Turns out these are essential to planning a complicated, ambitious award trip to a place like Australia.  In this set of posts I’ll tell you what I did with the hope that it will help someone else plan their dream trip.

Overview

The very first step to plan any trip is to identify how many points you need.  We wanted to fly business class, which is 67,500 each way on Star Alliance (United) carriers and 62,500 on OneWorld (AA) carriers.  We didn’t have enough points in any one program for a round-trip, so I knew we would need to book two one-way itineraries.  While this takes more work, it also provides a little more flexibility.

The next step is to make sure you have all of the points you need for your intended trip.  Chris and I were close on both United and AA miles but wound up needing to transfer some Chase points to United and purchase some AA miles, which we did using the bonus miles promotion that started at the beginning of February.  It’s important to note that we didn’t transfer the points until I knew all of the routing would work.  There’s no sense in transferring or buying points only to find out that your trip won’t work.  Both United and AA allow you to put itineraries on hold.  United requires you to actually have the points in your account, but fortunately Chase points transfer almost instantaneously.  AA is more generous and allows you a 5-day hold without having the points in your account.  If you purchase miles it takes up to 72 hours for them to post.  This wound up not being an issue for us because ours posted in about 24 hours, but if you’re in a pinch an agent can ticket your trip if they see you’ve purchased the miles.

Now that you know what you need and what you have, you can start searching for availability.  For a trip like Australia that has very limited award space, it’s essential to be as flexible as possible with your dates to maximize your chance at finding something.  I knew we needed to go before August and was aiming to find options in July.  I was hoping to find space in early July to take advantage of a free day off work, but knew it wouldn’t be a dealbreaker if I couldn’t.

I also found it to be helpful to list out all of the gateway airports to Australia from the US and vice-versa.  Airline award tools will not build the whole route for you in one search (e.g. DCA-SYD), so it’s better to go leg by leg.

Now for the details.

Booking a OneWorld Award

I started my award search on AA, but found that Qantas has a better award search tool.  After searching various dates and city combinations both to and from Australia, I found a great itinerary on Cathay Pacific via Hong Kong.  Fabulous, right?  We would leave from Cairns after visiting the Great Barrier Reef, have a brief stopover in HKG, and fly back to LAX.  Sounds great!  Well, it does if you have 125,000 miles lying around.  Lesson 1: OneWorld charges continent to continent, so my aforementioned itinerary would cost me the price an award ticket from Australia to Asia and Asia to the US.  Since we were a little short on 62,500 AA miles, there was no way 125,000 would work.  After learning this lesson via a chat with a stern AA agent, I went back to the drawing board.

Having learned my lesson about not touching into Asia, I started searching flights that went from cities such as Dallas and LA directly to Australia.  This spanned several days.  Then, I saw it: I was searching AA’s website and found a Qantas flight from DFW-Brisbane (BNE), then on to Sydney.  Thanks to AA’s amazing hold policy, I was able to quickly put it on hold.  After grabbing it, I got to work on the return routing (more on that in the next post).  After I worked that out, I went back to AA to figure out how we could get to DFW.  The only award space I could find went from DCA-MIA at 7 AM, MIA-DFW at 11 AM, and arrived in Dallas at 1, 9 hours before our flight to BNE.  Not ideal, but at least we could work with it (we’ve since switched on to a 2 PM flight to ORD that gets us to DFW around 7 PM, much more manageable).

After finding the availability, I had to call AA to get them to add the DCA-DFW leg before we booked the tickets.  The agent initially insisted there was no award space to DFW, so I had to tell him the exact flight numbers I was seeing on the AA website.  This is common, so always go into a call knowing exactly what you want, down to the flight number and times.  In the end he was able to finalize our itinerary and even saved us a booking fee of $25 each by suggesting we wait to book it online when our purchased miles posted.  In the end, we got our flights booked in business on Qantas for 62,500 miles and about $35 in taxes.

My AA experience was pretty straightforward, especially with the flexibility of being able to place an itinerary on hold while I worked out the details of the return flight.  As you’ll see in my next post, the United/Star Alliance booking process was much, much more difficult.

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