Newbie here, so apologies if this has been asked already, but am I doing this wrong?
It seems almost impossible to book a Star Alliance Award trip in Western Pacific on Air New Zealand from Australia (east coast). So I thought I'd ask here if I'm doing this wrong.
I transferred Velocity points to KF to be able to fly NZ to PPT (Tahiti) from either Brisbane or Sydney. The Star Alliance Western Pacific award chart is pretty good value.
NZ website will not let you search for award seats unless you have enough AirPoints already saved. So you have to search on on another Star Alliance website. Trouble is United, Air Canada and SQ websites don't show the same availability, and seats will come and go in seconds even in the same web session! Turns out NZ seems only to release award availability less than 3 months in advance, so your window for booking is pretty narrow.
Fortunately, the agents at KF are polite and helpful, but they advise that unless the award is booked on the SQ website you will pay a booking fee over the phone. Trouble is hardly any of the seats shown on other sites show up on SQ - they say that they are only "introducing" the ability to book Star Alliance flights on the SQ website. So you can't really book. So then you have to email KF with a tentative itinerary and wait about 4 days for them to reply with a yes or no. Meanwhile, availability has changed.
Does anyone have a better way to do this? Because this is a nightmare that in no way is a pleasant experience, let alone a "reward"-ing experience.
The upshot is that because plenty of seats were available on NZ from BNE to PPT, I booked a paid ticket to be sure of getting the date I wanted and booked another paid ticket on QF from PPT-SYD-CFS. In other words, I gave up. I would like to use my KF miles somehow in the Western Pacific but I'm disheartened by the experience.
It seems almost impossible to book a Star Alliance Award trip in Western Pacific on Air New Zealand from Australia (east coast). So I thought I'd ask here if I'm doing this wrong.
I transferred Velocity points to KF to be able to fly NZ to PPT (Tahiti) from either Brisbane or Sydney. The Star Alliance Western Pacific award chart is pretty good value.
NZ website will not let you search for award seats unless you have enough AirPoints already saved. So you have to search on on another Star Alliance website. Trouble is United, Air Canada and SQ websites don't show the same availability, and seats will come and go in seconds even in the same web session! Turns out NZ seems only to release award availability less than 3 months in advance, so your window for booking is pretty narrow.
Fortunately, the agents at KF are polite and helpful, but they advise that unless the award is booked on the SQ website you will pay a booking fee over the phone. Trouble is hardly any of the seats shown on other sites show up on SQ - they say that they are only "introducing" the ability to book Star Alliance flights on the SQ website. So you can't really book. So then you have to email KF with a tentative itinerary and wait about 4 days for them to reply with a yes or no. Meanwhile, availability has changed.
Does anyone have a better way to do this? Because this is a nightmare that in no way is a pleasant experience, let alone a "reward"-ing experience.
The upshot is that because plenty of seats were available on NZ from BNE to PPT, I booked a paid ticket to be sure of getting the date I wanted and booked another paid ticket on QF from PPT-SYD-CFS. In other words, I gave up. I would like to use my KF miles somehow in the Western Pacific but I'm disheartened by the experience.
