re: "oneworld" award (140K/280K/420K) Planning - The Definitive Thread
Hi everyone
Thank you for the replies and to all the pros who have shared their knowledge and experience. I spent a few more hours going through parts of this thread again and reading a few more websites.
I managed to find these flights available for 2 J trips. I think the following 280 itinerary meets the rules, but would appreciate confirmation or some feedback.
PER-HKG CX J
HKG-LAX CX J
Stop 1
LAX-KIX JL J
Stop 2
KIX-HKG CX J
Stop 3 (Separate flight back to Perth for a few months & back to HKG)
HKG-LHR CX/BA J
Stop 4 (Plenty of flights available around this time and we will make our own way from LHR to MAD)
MAD-DOH QR J
Stop 5?
DOH-PER QR J
7 segments, 34147 miles
I have read about the CX phantom flights so I have used JL website to verify them.
Ideally, we would have like to go to NRT but I found it quite hard to get tickets from LAX and KIX had more availability since that part of the trip is in only a few months.
Or the other idea was to use SIN (my preference since I have business there) as our stop but we found that there was too many wasted miles (most flights transit via HKG) as it was hard to find a direct flight to Europe from SIN.
Is LHR to MAD considered an open jaw? And would this be considered the 5[SUP]th[/SUP] stop? Or is DOH the 5[SUP]th[/SUP] stop? If there is too many stops, we can always just transit through DOH.
We are not too fussed about DOH and rather explore more of Europe. We were also thinking of going from LHR to another European city and just use DOH as a transit if there are too many stops.
CX or BA J Class? Which one would be a better flight?
How does it all look so far? Are there any recommendations for a better route? I hope it’s all good to go as I will need to book the PER-HKG-LAX flights as it’s quite soon and there’s only a few left.
And finally, how much time do I have to allocate to call Qantas to book the tickets and my understanding is that with our Europe flights (June to August Period), I can just book these first and call and change them again later at 3,500 points per person if something else suited us better. Are there any other tips for when I make this call?
Thanks so much for the help in advance. I can’t wait to book these and it will make the missus very happy.