I am sorry if this has been discussed before...

The time to book the air for our SilverSea cruise is approaching. I will try to book the outgoing flight to Barbados as soon as I can, but how do you handle the return leg when you cannot book that far out.

If I wait until I can do both, I am sure first class option will be out as they seem to greatly restrict the number of FF seats allowed.

Any help would be appreciated. By the way, we use US Airways.

Anthony

I highly recommend a company called Award Planner. (Awardplanner.com) They did a fantastic job for us, booking first class tickets from Ft. Lauderdale, thru Paris to Shanghai and Hong Kong using FF miles. This is their business and they do it very well! Good luck!

I recently reserved award tickets with AA and they allowed me to book the first segment as a one-way 331 days before the travel date, then I added the return when that date was 331 days out.

Dena

I just called Delta for upgrades on May 24th. from either NY or Atlanta to Nice. All gone. AND the 21st.22nd. and 23rd. Although Venice to NY on the return is open. No more F.F. miles for me via Delta's credit card. It's a farce.

I do frequent flyer miles ALL the time BUT I also start to call 330 days prior to the fly date. They are "mixing" things up now and not all coming out 330 days before. However, I call on that day and the next day and the next day until I get them. It normally takes me at least 3 hours worth of time on average to secure the award tickets. Often you have to call back many times if the seats are not loaded.

They also open up seats at the last minute within about a couple of weeks before departure. If the seats are not sold they then offer more award tickets. Pretty risky to take this route though you need confirmed air if you are cruising.

Ken sat on line from noon until 5.00pm doing air to Africa yesterday. LITERALLY. He got it but the rules were so complicated between using the carriers, and the available dates that it was a nightmare. This was a Continental award to South Africa ended up on KLM where he started but he was trying to improve the situation with Virgin Atlantic. KLM would not play ball unless the entire itinerary was on their airline. Also had to pay a high redemption figure for an "anytime" award to get it done.

They are not a farce really Neville just a VERY difficult thing to secure at times. Trying to get anything now in the Summer of 2006 is probably pretty much a dead issue unless you are just lucky and someone cancels a reservation.

Award Planner might work for anything close in. They may have ways the average person does not have to get things done.

I'm not sure how Awardplanner does it, but they do! It's their business so I think they have the timing down pat...and they clearly know the ins and outs of this very tedious process! If I remember correctly, the fee was something like $40. for a year of their services. Worth every penny!

Dealing with them is mostly by filling out a detailed questionnaire on line and communications thru email. I've spoken with them several times as well and the experience has consistently been professional and friendly.

Once our trip thru them is completed over the Christmas holidays, I'll be able to better evaluate the results!!

Did you have points in several programs or primarily in one place? Do they handle the transferring of pts from one account to another???

They say they will handle some type of point consolidations. But I can't find a list anywhere of point plans they actually handle. I have points in plans that they may not handle--aside from my Gold Points, I have Aeroplan miles (Air Canada, Star Alliance, surely they handle those), and "Air Miles (tm)", which is a Canadian thing, I think.

I must say that I agree with Neviboy re Delta Amex credit card. It is almost impossible to find flights (unless you use the "anytime" rate of about 250,000 miles). Now that Virgin Atlantic is dropping out, their partners, in my opinion, are nearly worthless. We live on the West Coast so I suppose that is part of my disillusion with Delta. No reason to carry the Amex card that carries an annual fee when I can't use the miles!

mpfund,
We used to have the Delta Amex too and found it "less than desireable" for our needs too. Have you looked into the Starwood AmEx? I like that the best because it works with something like 32 different airlines and everytime you transfer 20,000 points they give you a 5,000 pt. bonus....25,000 miles is enough for a coach ticket!

The airlines do make it very difficult to redeem FF miles, especially for people like me who don't have travel planned a year in advance. I have 300,000 miles on Continental and I haven't been able to use them.

I try to buy an economy ticket and use the miles to upgrade to business class. It has been almost impossible. They want to put you on a waiting list but I don't want to gamble.

Went I traveled to Europe for my cruise in September I ended up buying a discounted business class ticket on Continental partner Air France for not much more than it would have cost to purchase economy on Continental and use miles to upgrade -- even if they had let me. Of course that gave me another 15,000 miles on Continental that I still can't use.

You can use the business class anytime awards but then you're burning 200,000 miles for one ticket. It's very frustrating. Tom.

PS: As for credit cards, I find it better to use a travel credit card where they purchase the ticket for you on any airline. That way you don't have to be concerned with blackout dates and limited awards seats, and you earn miles for the flight.

Having spent over 1,000,000 skymiles in last year without once having to use SkyChoice Awards; I have to disagree. Of course, I live in the southeast where Delta is easy to use. The one advantage of SkyTeam is that it is easy to get across the Atlantic. Even booking my father and his wife LAX - Nice with return Paris - LAX I was able to get business seats on AF and I didn't even book these 331 days out. I am also sorry to see Virgin leaving as a partner. The contract was up for negotiation and Delta didn't like the terms Virgin was trying to impose. I guess my first Virgin flight for ROAR might be my last; of course, we will be able to earn qualification miles on Virgin starting next year.

Going to Asia is difficult on Delta/Skyteam. Since it is hard to get seats on Singapore now, your only choices are really Korean, Malaysian, South China, Continental, Northwest, or Air France. It is exremely difficult getting to Australia.

Award Planner sure sounds like a good service. I just don't know their value added if you only have points/miles in a single program. I have never had a problem talking to the folks at Delta's partner award desk; just remember, as Ngaire said, you need to invest time.

Marc, you got the penguins back !!! Great.
I called Delta today and was quoted $866 for the Europe cruise. Good price. We can upgrade the return portion, but the economy fare above is NOT UPGRADABLE. The upgradable fare is $1800.
"Highway robbery" is now "Airway robbery."

Delta has always been like that. AA used to be great because you could upgrade the lowest fare. Then they came out with a $250 per person per outbound and inbound flights - $500 each in essence. Now we seldom upgrade we just use full mileage awards.

Yes, we had a great deal going with AA for a long time. We usually travel off-season, so we would get discount fares from LAX to Europe for $500 or less round trip, then use 50,000 miles to upgrade. It doesn't get much better than paying $450 - $500 plus 50,000 miles for business class while earning miles on the flights too! Seems like they figured out what a great deal this was and have now added the $250 per direction surcharge for using miles to upgrade. We have not been upgrading recently, trying to conserve our miles since we don't travel as much for business as we used to. We are looking forward to traveling to Africa in the next couple of years and for a trip like that we would definitely go for a business class award.

We haven't had much trouble at all getting award flights through AA - sometimes we have needed to be flexible by a day or two. Recently we got award tickets on Air Tahiti Nui through AA for our PG trip (had to spend an extra night post-cruise), and LAX-Stockholm, LHR-LAX for next June, exactly the dates and flights we wanted.

Dena

I think it used to be much easier - actually I could count on using my AMEX miles and transfer them to Delta. They've upped the requirements with more fare classes and it's more expensive to buy coach and fly Business. We're sitting on over 450,000 Amex miles and are either going on a free RSSC Cruise or going to use them up with hotel stays before the point values change again.

I had no problem booking Delta. Vegas to Budapest and Amsterdam to Vegas Sept. 06. My husband got a free business class ticket and I paid $1800 for my ticket plus 50,000 miles. His ticket was 90,000. We are booked 1st class to JFK and business to Budapest. The same in reverse; all first and Business class. I just hope they are still in business. By the way, this will be our first river cruise.
Anyone thinking of Oceania; we did that this fall. It is very, very nice! And, of course, Radisson is wonderful. Judy

Tom G--my only comment about your Continental miles is that we just used them to fly to Australia and return from NZ buisness class on Qantas for our Radisson Sydney-Auckland cruise and it was a bargain at 105,000 miles each (at least when I got them last year). Qantas was terrific.

Just booked two r/t tickets (Atlanta to San Juan) online with Award Ticket on Delta.com, only took 3 minutes...r/wes

Colonel Wes, I'm confused. What does it mean to book online with Award Planner on Delta.com?. I thought Award Planner did the booking. I know Delta.com isDelta's Web site, which I use often.

Thanks.
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Eugene

Eugene, oops one word mistake, award ticket is delta's online booking link vs. award planner..thanks for the catch...r/wes

We use FF miles all the time...just booked business class tickets for a cruise next October on Radisson. Three tips:
1) As others have mentioned, plan ahead. The inventories open up 330 days out. I set a calendar reminder for this and get on the phone immediately.
2) Per tip 3 below, the best overall advice is if you don't get the answer you want from the CSA, call back. Case in point was the trip I booked yesterday (with UA miles, but on Lufthansa). Got the outbound I want (IAD-FRA-NCE), but the return (ATH-FRA-IAD) had a long layover in Frankfurt. How about the several eralier flights out of Frankfurt?, I asked. "Not available". I had the reservation placed on hold and called back a couple of hours later. What about the earlier connections out of Frankfurt? "Sure, which one do you want".
3) Check out www.flyertalk.com for the airline of your choice. You'll get great tips on tactics from professionals.

Also (at least this is the policy with United), tickets can be changed to other flights on the same itinerary and days at no charge, so you can wait-list for better connections which will quite often clear as inventory management releases seats over time. Even in the worst case, the change fee ($100 for United) may be worth it for the improvements. This past year we flew on business-class award travel to London and at the time of booking the only route available was Austrian Airlines to Vienna and then a flight back to London. Needless to say, it was worth the $100 later to change for the direct flight to London. I look at the "total cost of ownership" where the 80,000 miles (worth $800.00 if I'd used a cash-back card instead) + taxes ($90 for the recently booked itinerary) gets me a ticket that would cost $2000+ under the best of conditions.