How I booked 2 business class flights to Australia

Australia has been on my bucket list all of my life; maybe it’s the kangaroos or the cute koala bears or maybe it’s because I want to go to all 7 continents in my life.  Anyway, I had been looking for tickets to Australia for the past week or so.  I initially wanted to use Alaska miles since they partner with Fiji Airways, and that would cost 55K one-way in business class.  Since they allow 1 stopover on one-ways, I could stopover in Fiji for a couple of days before ending up in Australia/New Zealand.  Fiji actually had award availability the week of Thanksgiving; the only downside to them is that their business class seats aren’t fully flat and if I’m flying 14-15 hours on a plane, I’d like to be as fully flat as possible.

There were other options too; I could fly Star Alliance since I have something like 500K United miles.  The problem is that United had no availability to Australia in business.  Now I could have connected through Asia, which I seriously considered.  Asiana, who has been very stingy with their A380 first class actually had 2 seats available all Thanksgiving week.  I could have flown SEA-LAX-ICN (Seoul) and then ICN-SYD.  Then later I found out that Thai Airways actually had availability in first class on their A380 from BKK-SYD.  That’s awesome; I could experience 2 first class A380’s in one trip.  The drawback was that it costs 130K per person one-way in first class using a United partner airline.  Whew!  130K is A LOT of miles.  Then I did further research and found out that United only allows 3 segments on a one-way flight.  That means I theoretically couldn’t fly SEA-LAX-ICN-BKK-SYD (4 segments).  And what’s worse – the LAX-ICN flight is at 11am, and there is no United flight from SEA-LAX in the morning, and so I’d have to fly down the day before and spend the night in LAX.  Then I’d have to layover for another  day in BKK too; it seemed like it would have taken FOREVER to get to Australia.

That’s when I remembered from years of reading that one of the best uses of Delta Skymiles was flying to Australia on Virgin Australia.  Ever since last year, Delta removed fuel surcharges on VA; before that, you’d have to pay something like $500 per ticket or something really high.  Anyway, I went on to the Delta web site and lo and behold, I saw wide open availability for 2 people in business from LAX-SYD.  I mentioned this to my buddy and told him actually it was wide open from mid-November to mid-December.  I thought it was odd, but figured since Delta allowed one-way awards starting this year, I didn’t think much of it.  I then searched SEA-SYD to make sure that was available, and lo and behold, it did [and in first class no less].  I figured there would only be coach availability on the Delta flight, but it was actually in first class.  And to make it even better, I’d only have to lay over in LAX for 2-3 hours; something I could manage since we’d have access to the business class lounge.

The problem I now faced was that it costs 80K in business one-way per person, and I only had 78K Skypesos.  I then looked at what AMEX Delta cards I could apply for to get 82K more Skypesos, and for some strange reason, the max bonus was 30K for the Delta AMEX Business card.  The personal card only offered 10K on signup.  Man, that’s horrible.  I thought the standing offer was 50K and I remember 75K in the past.  Since Delta changed to a revenue based earnings model this year, they must have told AMEX to cut back on the number of Skymiles they were giving out.  So I decided to sleep on it and figure it out later.

When I woke up this morning, I read Frequent Miler’s Quick Deals about all the Delta award availability, and he said it must be a ‘glitch,’ since apparently, there wasn’t supposed to be that much availability.  CRAP!  That meant I had HOURS before this hit all the blogs and Delta would fix (apparently, you could only book online and the agents couldn’t book for you).  So as much as it pained me, I realized the only way to get those 82K miles quick was to transfer some of my AMEX Membership Rewards points.  I then Googled how long the transfers take, and found out it was INSTANT.  Great!  I then immediately transferred over 82K and found out I had to pay something like $47 for the transfer fee.  Whatever; I was under the gun.  I made the transfer and it literally took minutes.  I then had 160K miles in my account.  I then booked and ticketed the flights.  I made sure to save the PDF in case Delta doesn’t honor the award, but since this wasn’t a ‘pricing mistake,’ I think they have to honor it.  So currently I have our 2 one-ways there.  I’ll worry about the return later, which I’ll post when I figure it out.

While I don’t recommend transferring AMEX MR to Skymiles since it’s hard to use Skymiles due to how expensive their award flights are, this was an exception to the rule.  This may be one of the ONLY good Delta Skymiles redemption.  This also proves the importance of keeping a large balance in transferable programs like MR and Chase Ultimate Rewards for cases like these.  I try to keep at least 100K in each of those programs (200K if I can build it up since I usually have to book 2 tickets.)