I am going to give an example of our travel bookings and plans to try and help some people see what can be done and provide some rationality to what seems very irrational. A major factor of that is nested flights. Essentially this works on the basis that you want to fly A-C return, however, it is cheaper to book A-B & B-C than A-C, hence your second flight is nested within your first flight. Essentially, your whole trip is A-B-C-B-A.
Our fun run started when I used my excess CBA points with Velocity to book BNE-AUH-JFK on EY. I then booked JFK-YVR on CX with Qantas to go skiing at Whistler. Did you think I could get any awards flights back to Australia, even in economy, going any direction on any scheme???? NO! I then had to work out how to get home. This was August last year and I had just finished massive spreadsheets about flights, points accruals, different schemes, flight routings etc trying to work out what was good for us. The announcement of AA flying LAX-SYD and better pricing on AA codeshares made a huge difference.
My conclusions came to this:
a/ QF accrual on flights really sux everywhere except doing US domestic F flights
b/ AA accrual on QF J flights is great because of the distance.. and Australia is a long way from anywhere
c/ QF points on flights sux. Will always make 10x more on credit cards, even without the ATO, and it doesn't improve much with Status
d/ AA points accrual on flights is excellent, improves with status, and is massively improved with bonuses which are regularly 5x more for EXP especially on AA codeshares.
e/ It is far cheaper to fly to Australia from Europe than from the US and far cheaper to flying to Australia from Europe than Australia to Europe. Hence, I needed to make all my trips originate from Europe, in particular, OSL, CPH & DUB.
f/ OSL, CPH & DUB also seemed to be the targets of reasonably regular insanely priced sales from the US, particularly on BA and AA.
g/ for Brisbane, Oslo was the most likely places for discount sales with CX because of the direct flight. Most of these had a 6 month limit on return.
h/ I knew I had to fly back to Australia in January but could return in June (had meeting in San Francisco) or September (kids performing at Disneyland).
So I was waiting for the insanely discounted flights from US to OSL. Couple of weeks later, for a period of about 12 hours, a US$1400 fare became available and we picked up SFO-JFK-LHR-OSL on AA/BA in January and returning in June (to take best advantage of the CX Deals). Our SFO-JFK was in F on the transcontinental. I then added A$3100 OSL-LHR-HKG-BNE on for a total adult fare of A$5100 and A$4300 for the 2-11's. In comparison a r/t YVR-BNE was US$7k in J and $2.2k in Y (or $6k/$2k AUD from Australia). So far we have done just the Jan trip and earned approx 34k EQM and 64k miles each. As an EXP I think I earned about 85k miles.
I am now working on the return to Brisbane in July and a trip back to Whistler in January (AA year and SPG year are calendar years). I am looking at a series of nested trips consisting of bargain combinations, primarily, a oneway trip from Canada to Asia, a return from Asia to Brisbane (July and January) and a return from Asia (Penang in Malaysia specifically) to Canada. The links on the forums are:
AY: YYZ/YYC to BKK/HKG/SIN oneway J $1653 - FlyerTalk Forums
J PEN-YVR $1758CDN o/w One World and friends. F option available. - FlyerTalk Forums
Our Itinerary for July BNE-HKG-LHR-OSL-LHR-JFK-SFO and SFO-MCO-YYZ (obviously not direct) and YYZ-LHR-HEL-SIN and SIN-SYD-BNE (return in Jan)
We have another trip in September but this will be Y on AA using SWU's (sector wide upgrades - like free points upgrade). Hoping I can pull off something like SYD-LAX-MIA-GIG.
Our Itinerary for January is where it gets even more fun - Not travelling as much this year so want to maximise EQM's. BNE-SYD-SIN and cheap SIN-PEN and then PEN-YVR return combo. I have managed to work out combos which are around 90k EQM all up.
The PEN-YVR is a monster to crack. It all books into J & F booking codes and you can get it for most, if not all, AA codeshares which give 3xEQM. There is a routing which works on the way out PEN-KUL-SIN-SYD-HNL-DFW-YYZ, but I can't get it to work as the return. If not, it is something like PEN-KUL-HKG-LAX-YVR
http://goo.gl/flights/5qgs This also has versions with F, eg PEN-KUL-CGK-NRT-LAX-JFK-YYZ with the CGK-NRT-LAX in JAL F and LAX-JFK on AA 321T F. It is also 67% for 2-11's
I hope this gives some people ideas of the ways nesting specials can achieve a similar price to direct trips. When you do 3 days of quality J flying with stopovers in first class lounges, it IS part of your holiday.
Moin