A couple of Nick’s booking tricks uncovered during Flying by the Seat of our Points challenge

During our Flying by the Seat of our Points challenge, my journal became quiet after the first couple of days. The truth was that I didn’t have a ton of stuff to share as my bookings went slowly and frustratingly for those first couple of days. That was largely circumstantial: if I had a few more hours or as much as a day beyond our arbitrary check-in times, options broadened considerably. However, they say that necessity is the mother of invention, and getting to the places I did within the necessary time frames did indeed necessitate a few creative tricks that can be more broadly useful the next time you can’t find the availability you need.

Adding a partner connection can reduce the price of an American Airlines award

We’ve long known that there are situations where American Airlines will price an itinerary more favorably when including a connection to or from a smaller more secondary US city. Last year, I wrote about finding availability to and from Australia (especially on the Los Angeles to/from Sydney route) that priced for considerably less if you connected beyond Los Angeles.

A situation I hadn’t run into before this challenge was finding “cheap” American Airlines award space when adding a oneworld connection on the other end of the award.

I had been hunting for ways across the Atlantic via any program possible. A flight on the nonstop American Airlines route from Dallas to Paris priced around 150K American Airlines miles one-way.

However, search from Dallas to Madrid produced a decidedly different result: it was just 57,500 American Airlines miles to fly from Dallas to Paris on that same American Airlines flight and continue on from Paris to Madrid on Iberia Airlines. That was interesting because it seems that including the oneworld connection on Iberia caused the award price to drop about 100,000 miles down to the normal partner award price.

I stumbled on this accidentally because I legitimately was looking for availability to Madrid since there are a number of flights between Madrid and Marrakech, but this was a good reminder for me for the future: don’t only search American’s nonstop routes, but rather search routes from other American Airlines gateways to other European oneworld hubs like Marid and Helsinki that might produce an onward partner connection and drop the price.

As a similar example with less extreme but nonetheless significant savings available, here’s a look at the Dallas to Paris flight on Monday, June 17th. American wants 91K miles for that nonstop itinerary.

However, if you connect to Madrid on Iberia from either Paris Orly or CDG, the price drops to 57,500 miles.

That won’t be the case for every flight on every day, but it’s worth remembering that searching to/from those other oneworld hubs might open up “saver” pricing.

Note also that this can be a helpful reminder for those who aren’t using wider search tools: just because an airline has higher-than-base-level-pricing on its own metal doesn’t mean those seats aren’t available to partners. In the example above, even though American is charging its own members 91K for the nonstop from Dallas to Paris, that leg is indeed available to partner airlines. In this case, you could book that same flight (without the Iberia segment) via Alaska Airlines Mileage Plan for just 55,000 miles one way.

Finding business class space that Aeroplan isn’t showing

A longer frustration that I ran into during this challenge was in booking Thai Airways business class to Kuala Lumpur.

I didn’t have many options to get from Morocco to Kuala Lumpur in time to meet up with Greg and Tim and complete our local travel challenges (for me, the crucial difficulty was that I could easily get there if I left Marrakech 12 hours after arriving and without seeing anything beyond my dinner restaurant, but staying in Marrakech long enough to do any sightseeing made things difficult).

I eventually settled on only have one realistic routing option:

• Overall route: Marrakech to Frankfurt to Bangkok to Kuala Lumpur
• Here was the schedule and details:
  • Marrakech to Frankfurt on Eurowings Discover (a Lufthansa subsidiary) departing at 01:20 and arriving at 06:00 on Sunday, June 9^th
  • Frankfurt to Bangkok on Thai Airways in business class departing at 2:45pm on Sunday June 9th and arriving at 06:25am on Monday, June 10^th
  • Bangkok to Kuala Lumpur on Thai Airways departing at 09:05am and arriving at 12:15pm on Monday, June 10th

I ran into more difficulty booking that than I’d anticipated.

When I first began searching, that entire itinerary was available via Aeroplan for 110,000 miles with the Thai Airways segments both in business class and the segment from Marrakech to Frankfurt in economy class. That perplexed me though because the segment from Marrakech to Frankfurt was available in business class if booked separately, but when booked together with Thai the website made it a mixed-cabin itinerary.

I didn’t want to spend 110K total miles (and later that itinerary did not show up anymore), so I set my sights on figuring out how to pay less and ended up with an exercise in frustration that nonetheless yields some relevant info here.

Without belaboring the details, I eventually decided to book Marrakech to Frankfurt separately via Air Canada Aeroplan for 20K miles and about $75 in taxes. I wanted to separately book Frankfurt to Bangkok to Kuala Lumpur in Thai Airways business class — but I ran into issues there.

For some reason, the Air Canada website does not want to let you book Frankfurt to Kuala Lumpur in business class. Here’s a look at award availability from Frankfurt to Kuala Lumpur on Wednesday, June 19th (the situation mirrors mine from Marrakech last weekend):

As you can see above, Air Canada shows a couple of departures from Frankfurt that are only available in economy class (the first one above is the same routing I was trying to book just on an upcoming date to show that this problem wasn’t a one-off but rather one that persists, so the solutions are relevant).

If you look via popular search tools, you’ll find that itinerary is available to book entirely in business class via United Mileage Plus — albeit for 140,000 miles one way.

However, I don’t think any of the major search tools show that itinerary available to be booked in business class via Avianca LifeMiles.

That’s somewhat understandable since, if you use the default “Smart Search” capability of the LifeMiles site, the itinerary only shows up in economy class.

I’ve written before about the fact that Avianca’s “Smart Search” isn’t so smart. You can often find “hidden” availability by choosing an individual airline out of the drop-down menu instead of using the smart search function. I only expected that to work with flights that weren’t shown at all via the “smart search” function — in this case, I was surprised to find that when I chose “Thai Airways” from the drop down, the same flights shown above as available in economy class only were suddenly available in either economy class or business class.

Note that I am talking about my experience in the past tense, but the above screenshots above are all for travel next week, demonstrating that this wasn’t a one-off issue that I encountered as a momentary glitch but rather a problem that you might encounter any day.

Those flights did indeed show up via Avianca LifeMiles with a “Thai Airways” search and the itinerary prices at 78,000 Avianca LifeMiles. That seemed very appealing to me because there is a 15% transfer bonus from Amex Membership Rewards points to Avianca LifeMiles, which meant that I’d only need 68,000 Membership Rewards points to have more than 78,000 LifeMiles. Furthermore, by subscribing to LifeMiles+ for $20 per month, I’d get back 10% of the miles used (a rebate of 7,800 LifeMiles).

In my case, that didn’t work out. I bought the LifeMiles+ subscription successfully then logged in to my Amex account and transferred points to LifeMiles and went back to LifeMiles.com to find the website went down for maintenance in the 2-3 minute interim between having purchased LifeMiles+ and having transferred the miles. When the site came back up, my miles weren’t available to be used (and as it turned out they were not available to be used for days afterward). I ended up getting on a US VPN and transferring to my wife’s LifeMiles account — that transfer went through immediately. I still had difficulty booking, but that’s a separate story).

However, the fact that it didn’t work out immediately led to me looking for other ways around the problem. I should note that I bet if I called Air Canada Aeroplan, they might have been able to see and book the Thai Airways space over the phone. Indeed, while search tools like PointsYeah and AwardTool do not show that Thai Airways itinerary available to Air Canada Aeroplan, search tool Point.me does show that the Thai Airways itinerary should be available to Air Canada Aeroplan (though note that Point.me is not displaying accurate taxes & fees here as Aeroplan members would pay the same taxes that United MileagePlus members would pay plus the $39 CAD partner booking fee. Departure taxes from Germany are always north of $100).

I imagine that Point.me is correct that this itinerary is bookable via Aeroplan, but unfortunately it is not via the Air Canada website. Further unfortunate is the fact that the Aeroplan call center is not open 24 hours per day. That really perplexes me given the fact that Aeroplan has more partner airlines than any other airline program in the world — imagine being stuck with a problem with your ticket while you’re in a far-flung country in the middle of the day time locally only to find that you can’t get in touch with Aeroplan because it’s night time in Canada? The Air Canada Aeroplan call center is closed from 10pm to 7am Eastern time.

As fate would have it, they were closed when I needed them, so calling to ticket the above itinerary wasn’t a feasible option.

Oddly / interestingly, I found that when I searched Air Canada from Frankfurt to Bangkok to Singapore (instead of Kuala Lumpur), both Thai Airways flights suddenly had business class availability both on the long-haul from Frankfurt to Bangkok and the connection to Singapore.

That was notable in my circumstances because the Air Canada site was showing different results depending on how I searched. Backing up to last weekend, these were the results I was getting:

• Frankfurt to Bangkok to Kuala Lumpur: Economy class only
• Frankfurt to Bangkok to Singapore: Economy or business class available on both segments
• Frankfurt to Bangkok: Not available at all

Note that this is where my experience diverges from my example date next week — on my example date next week, you can book Frankfurt to Bangkok alone. However, when I ran into this issue last weekend, the Air Canada site did not show that segment available at all on its own.

That was a problem for me. For the purposes of the competition, I needed to get that segment booked from Frankfurt to Bangkok as it would put me a stone’s throw from Kuala Lumpur and I could book a separate ticket from Bangkok to Kuala Lumpur if necessary. Unfortunately, unrelated issues with LifeMiles meant that I’d been unable to book that segment via LifeMiles.

However, I ran into a workaround. Despite the fact that Air Canada returned no availability for Frankfurt-to-Bangkok on the date I needed, I knew that the Frankfurt-to-Bangkok segment on Thai Airways must have business class seats available since Air Canada could see business class availability if my end point were Singapore. For some reason, I couldn’t get them to show business class on that long-haul leg to Bangkok if the end point were Bangkok or Kuala Lumpur.

Enter Air Canada’s stopover tool.

Air Canada allows a stopover on a one-way award for an additional 5,000 miles. I’ve written about calling Air Canada to book an award with a stopover, but Air Canada does allow some self-service stopover booking on their website. We wrote about it when they launched. Unfortunately, the online tool is very limited in scope — complicated stopover itineraries still require a phone call. However, it occurred to me that this was the type of situation where the self-service tool might be useful for me.

Went to AirCanada.com and selected the multi-city / stopover booking tool. I don’t find the multi-city took intuitive to use because if you simply enter separate flight info for each segment, it will price cumulatively. Instead, when you need to do is enter your origin and end point and then select “Add stopover for flight 1” and enter your stopover airport, then “remove flight” on “Flight 2”.

Setting up the tool to search for Frankfurt-to-Singapore with a stopover in Bangkok would look like this:

That worked! I could see availability on the Frankfurt to Bangkok leg in business class if I set up Bangkok as a stopover point rather than as a destination.

I actually recorded that flow during my search process, so if you’d like to see it in action, check out this Youtube video. You’ll have to forgive my poor sound quality and lack of enthusiasm — in the moment, I was pretty tired after being awake all night long looking at award availability and somewhat frustrated after striking out a bunch, but the video shows exactly the problem as described above and the workaround with a stopover.

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In the end, I still didn’t book via Air Canada Aeroplan. That extra leg to Singapore would have been a throwaway leg that would be costing me more miles than it should and I was determined to fight through with Avianca LifeMiles and pay fewer points, especially because of the 15% transfer bonus from Amex (in the end, I booked the Frankfurt to Bangkok leg via Avianca LifeMiles for 78K miles / 68K Amex points using my wife’s account, but that’s another story and post of its own I think). Still, the ability to force Air Canada’s site to show me the leg I wanted by adding Bangkok as a stopover point is a strong-arm tactic that I’ll keep in mind the next time I run into a situation where the Air Canada site won’t show me what I want and when the call center is closed or I’m overseas and calling Air Canada to spend hours on hold isn’t practical.

Bottom Line

I ran into some difficulty in getting the flights I wanted during our Flying by the Seat of our Points challenge, but that difficulty led me to find ways to sidestep the barriers I encountered to get a couple of flights I wanted. Of key importance here is the fact that while my specific obstacles won’t be relevant for most readers, the general situations they represent and the ways I sidestepped those obstacles certainly could come in handy. Hopefully, your award searches go more smoothly than mine did — but someday when they don’t, these can be useful tricks to keep in mind.

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