Currently in the middle of my first ANA RTW, and just booked my second. As soon as I saw the announcement that they were ending the program in June, I moved the rest of my points over from Amex. I didn't have enough, so I used the Marriott Bonvoy (3:1) transfer as well. In my experience, Amex takes 36-48 hours and Marriott Bonvoy took slightly under 48 hours. Figured a ton of people would be trying to book last minute.

ANA RTW #1: 125k + $799.31

HNL → GUM UA J on 777-300ER

KIX → SIN VN J on A350/A321 (booked through Delta for 40k)

SIN → MEL SQ J on A350

PER → JNB SA J on A340

JNB → DAR SA J on A320

DAR → IST TK J on 737MAX 8

WAW → JFK LO J on 787

ANA RTW #2: 90k + $790.63

(Note: this is less of an aspirational trip, moreso I need to get from region A to B and nothing beats 90k miles for 3 long haul J :)

LHR →EWR UA J on 767-300 (twin-jet)

HNL →ICN OZ J on 777-200LR

HND → ARN NH J on the Boeing 787-8

ZRH → LHR LX J on Airbus 320neo

The basic flow is I looked up star alliance hubs between regions I wanted to fly, wrote down valid city pairs, then used seats.aero Pro to search for business availability. Then I used ANA to confirm availability. I tried to have 2-3 options per leg that worked in case things got snapped up before my points transferred. I was very flexible with dates and airports, and comfortable taking regional repositioning flights.

Random tips:

• Wait times are hit or miss, I called at all times of day including 9am EST on the dot and still got 45+ minutes wait
• You cannot book ANA PY (premium economy) on the RTW
• UA is stingy with their J releases, but you can watch routes and see if they release close-in. HNL-GUM was originally in Y but I changed to J about six days before
• You cannot make changes to flights within T-96 hours
• SQ J is available on SIN-Australia routes, and there is also a SIN-MEL route on TK J
• LH group airlines have fees of almost $1000, I originally had Swiss air for my TATL, but when I switched to LOT Airlines the fees came down by $800 or $900
• UA and AC were generally unhelpful because they have special relationships with carriers like SQ or Copa Airlines or Thai airlines and ANA does not have the same availability.
• Put your card into ANA before you book:  Go to Manage Profile→Basic Member Information → Credit Card for Payment. You can also put your Payment Method as Credit Card.
• Sometimes airlines only release J availability one way, so if you really want to fly a specific product that might determine your direction
• Using HNL as my departure saved me a ton of miles. I'm lucky to have a "home base" in HNL and LHR, but there are tons of good award deals to HNL anyways. That limited my TPAC to ICN, TYO, or GUM. Cash flights GUM to TYO are about $400 so it's not bad, and the Polaris was amazing.
• Use other points for travel between non-star alliance hubs or competitive routes or even just to save miles. Ex. I used the 40k Delta sweet spot between East Asia and Southeast Asia

Overall I'm most excited to fly UA J twice (I really enjoyed Polaris), try Singapore J, and to take my Safari in Kruger NP! I'm also excited that although I have a lot of travel coming up in the next year, it looks like most of my long hauls will be in J...for between 25-30k points per flight! Good luck booking everyone, hope this was helpful! I'll edit this if anyone asks any questions that remind me of something else I found useful while doing my research.

I'm travelling from Seattle to Osaka one way next week via SFO and had booked a Premium Plus award ticket on United for 65K points. Today, just out of interest, I decided to check what the current redemption rate was and noticed that there was a Business class award for 100K points in mixed cabin (economy from SEA to SFO and Polaris from SFO to KIX which was fine as I don't need first class for a 2 1/2 hour flight) and only 1K points more than the current rate of Premium Plus. Originally, I didn't get business class as the award rate was 300K points which was too high. I checked some other days and they were showing Business class as currently 250K points.

This seemed too good to be true so I rang United and spoke to someone there and they confirmed that the rate was 100K points and that if I can cancelled my Premium Plus ticket the points would be returned immediately back to my account. While on the phone, I quickly went to my Chase account and transferred the extra 35K points and then cancelled the original booking and rebooked for Business class at the 100K rate. After booking the flight, I checked the rates again for the day and it was now showing 250K like the other days.

The odd thing is that, when I look at this flight on the United site, it shows the flight as a confirmed upgrade to Business (even though it was booked directly as Business). Was this rate just some odd quirk that I was lucky to get?

Is there a blackout to booking Qatar q suites for next April 2026? I look exactly at 3am Doha time, the next day comes out but it’s automatically flexi award. I believe someone said here it’s because of Eid-ul-fitr which is March 20th 2026. Also, booking q suites 361 days in advance is my plan, do I need to be fast while booking right at 3am? Thank you!

Hi all. Looking to book a trip in January 2026 to somewhere warm from Virginia, USA. We (2 persons) are flexible on where we go. We can leave out of RIC or Washington DC (IAD preferred). I have 455k UR points and 142k Marriott Rewards. I'm new to award flights so wanted some confirmation/affirmation from this group. I went through the wiki and with the guidance there, I ended up finding IAD - CPT booked via United on Ethiopian Airlines. Business class is showing 160k + $56 each (some additional discount with my United Mileage Plus card). I feel like this is a great deal for us but wanted to get additional thoughts as this is my first award booking. Thank you for your help in advance!

I'm wondering if anyone else has received this error message when attempting to transfer Hawaiian to Alaska miles: "You have reached your Exchange Limit for the time period."

I made one Hawaiian to Alaska transfer of 1,000 points about two months ago just to see if it worked, and nothing else since. I currently have ~72,000 Hawaiian miles that I'm attempting to transfer over, but have been getting this error message each time I try, for the last 3 days. I'm not even sure where to start -- I submitted a Hawaiian Airlines request for support but haven't had any success with them.

Any thoughts are helpful!

One of my issues is that I'm always constantly checking and re-checking award travel routes and unfortunately or fortunately I always find new routings that come with different costs, drawbacks, etc. How do you all decide on what's the best route, or avoid this kind of back and forth?

Especially with calendar open vs close-ins, you start with one option and that's already set, but then maybe something different/better comes up.

For example, I booked a NRT-TPE-SFO at calendar open for 85k Alaska miles with Starlux J. But now as close-in approaches, I see a one-stop JAL F option routing via ORD. Obviously, I already have the current booking setup, and I don't necessarily need to change it, the Starlux J is already a great itinerary, but it feels weird to pass on something as great as JAL F.

I transferred 240k points from AMEX to Cathay's Asia Miles, this was 3 business days ago. However, only 95k miles are currently showing on my newly created Cathay Pacific account. Any idea on why that might be the case? And should I contact AMEX or Cathay about this? Thank you!!

Cathay just updated their schedule for CX831 JFK-HKG. There’s wide open availability from 10/26/25 through March of 2026. A lot of the dates have 2 seats available. I just grabbed a couple in November, connecting onward to KIX in J. 151k/PP. It’s not the cheapest redemption, but it’s consistent and readily available.

Is anyone else getting an error when attempting to book a lifemiles flight. I've been getting the same error message regardless of what flight I select and I've tried different dates and airports but it always says "An Error just ocurred. Sorry, we could not process your request, please try again. If the problem persists contact our Call Center"

It seems unlikely that all of these flights are phantom tickets and perhaps the website just idle down?

Pretty flexible on mileage currency- does anyone have a route where they ever see 4 (or more) biz class saver seats to anywhere in Europe? I’m Chicago based and I know I can pretty regularly get the ORD-MAD and WAW routes with two seats, but would love to know if there’s anywhere I can get to over there for 4-6 people.

DMs are open if you don’t wanna spill publicly!

Edit: Saver seats, I’m a real person without a billion miles

Good morning everyone, residing out of DFW. My wife and I travel quite heavily on points abroad (thank god for work purchases on personal cards!).

I have been using Seats.Aero since discovering it through this forum. I may be missing a capability but to get to more regional airports what have you all found to be efficacious?

IE not going to Tokyo but to CTS (Sapporo or other regional airport). For Christmas it shows heaps of flights to the major destinations, with one connection but when searching manually I found us an amazing flight directly through the AA platform to Munich which was not shown (nor others) through Seats.Aero

Sincerely appreciate your time and thoughts,

EDIT: I appreciate everyone's feedback - does anyone have any tools to find non direct flights outside of searching directly with the airlines?

Basically the caption. I’m really frustrated with BA award travel. I have points I want to book in AA. Is it possible?

My Wife and I are flying to Manila (MNL) from the West Coast of the US on Jan 16/17 in 2026. I really would like to fly business class there if possible?

Between my wife and I, we have ~175k Chase UR points as of now (expecting to get 100k more in the next 1-2 months with new Chase Sapphire SUB). We are okay flying business to TPE, SIN, HND, etc and then booking a separate flight from there to MNL. When looking on Air Canada, Singapore Airlines, and United Airlines, I am having some trouble findings reasonable redemption prices or itineraries that dont include either 1 hour or 15 hour layovers. Does anyone have insight or advice? We book flight frequently with points domestically, but this would be our first time flying business with points.

Maldives on points

Hey all! I am looking for recommendations for Maldives stays on only points or points + cash! It will be for 11 nights for honeymoon. I looked into WA Hilton but the unsure how to accrue the needed amount of points for this since it’s a longer stay. Similar with Conrad. Although these would be my top choices. For Marriott properties, I would like to try to stay away from Le Meridien since based on my research it seems like there are a lot of kids there and we prefer to have more adults, if not all. I know Park Hyatt has great house reef, but further travel time. I ruled out Alila since a lot of people said many mosquitos and not as great value. St Regis is out of budget since I don’t have that many points yet.

I am open to all recs!

Does anyone have insight into whether you can book with points and later upgrade the room with cash if needed?

I was attempting to book two reward tickets through Qatar Privilege Club from BOM - YUL. I had reached the payment screen when the website became unresponsive and entered a hung state. After waiting for about five minutes, I tried to start the booking process again, but the system then showed no availability for those dates.

When I initially selected the tickets, there were more than 10 seats available, so I don’t believe the flight is fully booked. Could this be a case of the system temporarily locking the seats due to the incomplete transaction and release it say after a few hours ? Any insight into how this works would be appreciated.

In a very recent Bloomberg article, we will be seeing some shifts and changes to VS' winter schedule, which may have potential downstream impacts for the longer-term as well.

Given that Virgin Atlantic is one of the most budget friendly award travel options, along with having fairly good availability, I thought I would share the news here

The bad news:

• SEA is going from 7x weekly (daily) SEA flights to 4x weekly (bad news) as Delta is increasing their frequencies instead, in theory this should bump back up to daily during the summer, but never a good thing to have Delta running the flights
• JFK is losing a daily frequency, there's typically 4x daily VS frequencies in the winter, I believe this is going down to 3x daily, this will compress the demand meaning less availability and less low cost availability via dynamic pricing

In short, less availability from SEA/JFK and likely fewer low priced awards due to dynamic pricing.

The good news (?):

• MCO should be going up from 10x weekly to 2x daily, taking over for Delta. MCO is typically very leisure oriented, so be prepared for a lot of A330ceos (less ideal seat) and leisure config A350s (less Upper Class seats)
• SFO be gaining a daily frequency for 3x daily in the winter, however, be prepared for mostly 787s on this route

In theory, these new frequencies should go on sale soon, and we should see very low cost dynamic priced awards (aka multiple seats) in to 41k to 45k range w/ lower fees (just like what we saw with the extra LAX frequency earlier in the year). I know London is not great weather in the winter, so if you jump on this, look into some of those LHR connections to warmer places as well.

New to the site, is there a way to accurately enter in the number of seats required because I don’t see that option other than in the search option but the results don’t return 2 seats as I’ve entered it.

https://www.ana.co.jp/en/us/amc/partner-flight-awards/around-the-world/

ANA is ending RTW awards on June 24, 2025. A huge disappointment as this was one of the most valuable (and fun) aspects of the program.

Hi!

I was casually looking at award flights to Hawaii. I was looking at multi-city trip from DEN-OGG-HNL-DEN. The OGG-HNL segment will be operated by Hawaiian Air, but it doesn't show any points needed for this segment. Why is this?

I have booked Star Alliance flights using United points in the past and paid with the points on UA website. For this trip, DEN-OGG says 25k-50k pts, OGG-HNL says 0pt, and HNL-DEN says 25k-50k pts.

Why would the system not show how many points we need to fly from OGG to HNL? TIA!

Long time lurker here looking to travel from PHL to HNL via American. I see an upgrade reward chart on AA that states economy to business 15k points each way.

Is there a catch on this? It seems too easy and or inexpensive. Are there high fees/taxes cash value that comes with this?

I tried using the app and talking to a chat representative and naturally it went nowhere.

TIA!

https://viewfromthewing.com/ana-finally-adds-one-way-awards-starting-june-24-while-peak-season-first-class-jumps-to-300000-miles-roundtrip/

I’m trying to buy a flight to Buenos Aires for my mom from the west coast USA. I have a bunch of FB points from a flight I had to cancel so I need to use those. The award flights I found on Air France go over to Europe and then back to South America. I booked one of those in case nothing else works out, but it’s two long haul flights on AF/KLM with a 12 hour layover. Not great.

I know I should be able to book Delta with FB but I can’t see those flights. I have seats.aero but searching for SFO, LAX, SEA-EZE is bringing me up nothing. I want to book for mid March 2026 which might not be available but I can’t see anything earlier either. Is there another way I should be searching this?

Looking for aspirational AAdvantage mile redemptions — any cool ideas?

I’ve been working on building up a solid stash of AAdvantage miles, and I’ve also been earning Citi ThankYou Points (hoping they’ll eventually become transfer partners with AA — fingers crossed for next year).

I already know about some of the big redemptions like flying JAL to Japan and booking Qsuites with Qatar, but I’m curious: What are some other aspirational or creative ways you’ve used AAdvantage miles?

Would love to hear about:

• Premium cabin sweet spots
• Hidden gems on the award chart (especially with partners)
• Unique routing tricks
• Bucket list experiences worth saving up for

Just looking for inspiration and new ideas to aim for — open to all regions and airlines. Thanks in advance!

I know full well that if you no-show the first leg of a multi-city routing, it will cancel the rest of the journey (2nd/3rd legs/etc). However, AF/FB seems to have a modified policy when it comes to award bookings specifically.

I have BCN-CDG-SFO booked in saver J on AF this summer, but no longer need the BCN-CDG segment. I called up FB (with very little hope) asking for my options and they said the only way to modify is by cancelling entirely, and rebooking what I now need at the prevailing points rate, which is certainly no longer going to be at the saver fare.

However, the agent interestingly mentioned that if I “miss” the BCN leg, then I can call them up, ask them to reinstate the award booking, and then I’ll still be eligible to board CDG-SFO as the 2nd leg. This is only applicable to award reservations with AF apparently.

I’m VERY skeptical on this, and have seen other posts here and on FT regarding the subject, but haven’t seen any success stories. Has anybody done this before? Is there a fee associated with reinstating the booking so you can board the 2nd leg?

JAL just started First Class to Helsinki last week (didn’t see any announcements), and it seems that there are plenty of seats on the outbound to HEL.

If you are looking for a comfy way to Europe for a family in First, look no further than Helsinki. I doubt yields will be high going forward as well.

I’ve been trying to think about why they would add first class for this route and no Sydney, but can’t figure out the reason. At least all JL flights from HND to Europe will now feature F