Being flexible on your travel dates even just 1 day in either direction can greatly increase your chances of
finding an award itinerary that will work for you.
Not exact matches
If you know that your
award is legit, but the agent is stuck, it's best to hang up and call again until you
find experienced agents who will be able to help you with your
itinerary.
Flying from the East Coast, you can book a business class
award for 110,000 Alaska Mileage Plan miles if you can
find an
itinerary that includes only 1 partner (American Airlines or Qantas).
In order to book an
award ticket, you must be able to
find a cash ticket on Amtrak.com for the same
itinerary.
If you can
find award availability space on any specific flight, you can use that as part of your
itinerary
When trying to piece together an
itinerary, I think the best thing to do try to
find out if there are
award flights into and out of the hub cities of your carrier.
If you know that your
award is legit, but the agent is stuck, it's best to hang up and call again until you
find experienced agents who will be able to help you with your
itinerary.
You can estimate the surcharge before looking for
award space by using ITA Matrix to
find the same
itinerary as a paid (or revenue) ticket.
Find out more about the
award - winning Caribbean cruise
itineraries to choose from for your dream vacation for 2016 - 2017
Other changes that affect the
itinerary, including a different origin or destination, will be re-priced at the new, higher
award level.For example, say you want to travel on December 20 to visit family in Montreal, but you can't
find award space from your home in Dallas.
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Finding a great
itinerary with ITA Matrix can make it easier to reconstruct elsewhere for cash or
award tickets.
I simply
found Delta
award availability on Korean's search engine and had the Korean Air agent add the DCA to JFK and DTW to DCA to our
itinerary.
Finding and adding Aerolíneas Argentinas
award space to a Delta
award reservation can be a bit tricky, so check out our guides here: Booking an Awesome Argentina
Itinerary with -LSB-...]
Waitlisting
Awards Before Booking Your Flight — If you've found award availability, but the option presented to you is not your ideal choice, consider waitlisting awards for other itineraries that you p
Awards Before Booking Your Flight — If you've
found award availability, but the option presented to you is not your ideal choice, consider waitlisting
awards for other itineraries that you p
awards for other
itineraries that you prefer.
An example is if you book an international
award from a gateway city, but can not
find the same
itinerary with a domestic connection to get to the gateway city.
You can only book
award tickets for
itineraries that can be
found using standard round - trip or one - way searches
It's also interesting to me how there often comes a «reality check» point in
award booking when you've
found an
itinerary you're enthusiastic about and the rest of the family might not be as thrilled with it as you are.
I also
found that this generally only works for
itineraries that would fall in the Hop, Skip and Jump zones of the
award chart and have flight availability.
One of the best pieces of advice about
finding award space that I could offer is —
find the most difficult leg of the
itinerary, and work from there.
Sure enough, the Friday before I was supposed to fly (July 31), I
found an open
award seat on the FRA - LAX flight aboard the A380, and rebooked that segment of my
itinerary online.