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United Airlines Mileage Plus is offering some nice deals to/from Hawaii, particularly on awards between Hawaii and the west coast of the US. You could pay fewer net points if you can find any of these available to Turkish Miles & Smiles, but if you’re flush with United miles and looking for an easy booking option — including during the winter holiday season as pointed out by Award Wallet — you may be in luck.
The Deal
- United has award flights between select US cities and Hawaii from just 9,100 miles each way
Quick Thoughts
Award Wallet reports sale prices from just 9,100 United miles each way. That’s a great deal in comparison to the old “standard” award price of 22,500 miles each way from the mainland US to Hawaii.
Los Angeles starts at 9500 each way which is still a solid deal.
Availability is tighter coming from Hawaii back to the mainland, but I didn’t have much trouble finding a round trip from San Francisco to Honolulu for 18,200 miles in January.
On the other hand, even these great rates are a bit more than the 7500 miles each way that Star Alliance partner Turkish Miles & Smiles charges for an economy class trip on United anywhere within the United States — including to/from Hawaii. Of course, Turkish can be difficult to deal with and the website isn’t currently functioning (it is missing the “submit” button to submit payment details on the final checkout screen). Email bookings are still working (a member of our Frequent Miler Insiders Facebook group just this morning reported having successfully ticketed a business class flight to Hawaii for just 12,500 Turkish miles one way), but there is no doubt that it is much easier to book these flights via United (and in many cases I expect that even these cheap flights may not be available to partners).
If you are looking to travel to Hawaii, head over to United.com and check the box that says “book with miles” and the “flexible dates” box to view calendar results by month.
H/T: Award Wallet
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Nick you are the coolest man, I’m still super grateful for that sweet spot to Hawaii you found with Turkish Airways
Hi Nick, I know you were using the SFO-HNL as an example, but in this scenario, would it be better to book through the Chase Travel Portal? For that exact travel itinerary and using the Reserve, the points required come out to 13,200. If using the Preferred I think the points needed for this particular redemption would still be about 15k points. Would this be a correct assessment?
Also with Turkish the 15K roundtrip I think is only available for direct flights when I tried looking for ATL to HNL it had a stop in SFO and the round trip came out to 30K total
No, I’ve booked tickets with 2 connections for 7.5K each way. If the layovers are more than 4 hours in one direction though, they charge for two awards. You can read more about it in the guide to booking United with Turkish miles that I linked to in the post.
Turkish STILL hasn’t fixed their website?!
Nope. Not a priority I guess.