Hawaii

Hi Anneabelle,

We just booked a trip to Hawaii :)  Andrew is SO excited.  It is so nice to see him so excited about something and I am excited too.  Alexandria has a two week break at the beginning of April so that is when we are going.  In the end we ended up booking the tickets with cash, but not before I did a ton of points research.  I want to summarize that research here for my own benefit.  There was no amazing answer with points given the current amount of points we own.  And we ended up finding flights from Denver to Kona (Big Island) for $465 each on Alaska, which was about half the other cheapest tickets.  I think they might have been having a sale.  It means leaving and returning mid-week instead of the weekend but we can make that work.  It also means we will have a 12 hour layover in Seattle on the way back, after a short redeye (urg!), but we plan to make the most of it and tour Seattle for the day.

I used the Travel is Free chart of Cheapest Ways to Get to Hawaii Using Miles as a guide.

• The first one on the list is Virgin Elevate at 20K, which would be amazing since it is cheaper than going to Ottawa.  This one had me so confused since I hadn't looked in to Virgin before.  The key is that this value is only when going through a partner airline (like Hawaiian). Million Mile Secrets explained it very well: "While Virgin America’s frequent flyer program uses a revenue-based system on their own flights, they have mileage-based charts for their partner
  airlines." And then in terms of booking on Hawaiian as a partner airline: "When booking award tickets, you can only book flights on Hawaiian Airlines (the price for a ticket does not include any connecting flights on Virgin America). So if you aren’t located in a city served by Hawaiian Airlines, you’ll have to use more points to book a separate Virgin America flight to 1st get to a Hawaiian Airlines city."  This meant that I would search on Virgin and could see DEN because it is served by Virgin but then the point values were way more than 20K.  Then I would search for the 20K return trips and DEN wouldn't be on the list, because Hawaiian doesn't fly to DEN.  Based on the other points below it meant we would have had to buy a separate ticket RT to one of the cities Hawaiian flies to (e.g. PHX, or SJC and join it with a work trip) and then also pay in cash/points for the trip within the islands.
• Virgin Elevate is 2:1 with AMEX points so it makes it worth more like 40K return if you are comparing to other AMEX transfers.  But is is 1:1 with the 20K becomes 25K bonus for SPG.  
• Supposedly Hawaiian has seasonal service direct to KOA from LAX but I couldn't find it.
• It should be an additional 6K RT with Virgin Elevate to fly inter-island with Hawaiian.
• 20K that do exist:
• Only to HNL: PHX, SAN, Sacramento, Las Vegas, Oakland
• SJC can go to HNL or OGG
• SFO can go to HNL or OGG
• Singapore got me so excited because as a transfer partner with AMEX, SPG, and Chase we would have had the 35K*4 that we needed.  But what I read (I don't know where the link is now) is that you have to find availability on United metal and on the United search engine you have to see both the first column with a 22.5K fare (their lowest) as well as a value in the second column.  This corresponds to having a line and the dots in the calendar view.  And we couldn't be signed in, because then we see the XN fares that are only available because of the credit card we have.  I could find this for the Tuesday before (we ideally wanted Sat-Sat) but I couldn't find anything on the way back.  Also, with the transfers from SPG that may take a few days and then needing to phone Singapore it felt a bit daunting to hope that this one available flight would still be there.  And I didn't know if you could do one-way awards with Singapore.
• Some of them like Alaska and AA are only transfers from SPG.  We would have about 87K with the transfer bonus but this wasn't enough to look in to these programs.  We also didn't have enough AMEX and SPG to make Hawaiian work, although it was much closer.  That said I am not sure the Hawaiian points needed were as cheap as he has in the table.  
• It was the same booking with United Miles, we just didn't have enough (not even close) with our Chase and United points.  Which was too bad because United has a direct from DEN to KOA.  That said we started to wonder if it was actually the best use of the points.  At 45K is it better to go to Hawaii or is it better value to buy the 25K Ottawa tickets that can actually be quite expensive.  At $465 a ticket the answer was simple but it wasn't so clear at some of the other ticket costs.  
• I looked at Delta but it was super pricey point requirements.
• From DEN, British Airways would have been 40K, assuming with could find a flight from here to the West Coast and then direct to KOA (7500+12500 each).  As a transfer partner of everything we could have made this work, and pretty much used up all our points.  I used this post to guide me in looking up the flights on American's website since as others have mentioned the BA website tried to route me through Heathrow!  Sadly the available flights were horrible, especially on the return.  They were midweek, which in the end we ended up booking anyways, but they had really bad routings on the way home.  Kona to Portland, to Dalla, to Denver - yuck and more expensive with a distance based program.  
• Aeroplan was the most interesting.  I hadn't been looking at it because it was 45K but then I got the idea of whether I could combine it with Ottawa trips.  It turns out it is possible.  YOW to KOA then KOA to DEN (with a 3 month stopover) and then DEN to YOW was also 45K.  This means that if I had booked a RT from DEN to YOW for 25K that got us there a week or so before going to Hawaii and then came back after the later summer trip I could have two Ottawa trips plus the Hawaii trip for 75K.  I think we only had enough points (and vacation time) that it would have just been the girls and me doing that, and a 11 hour flight from Newark to HNL with the girls by myself did not really excite me.  I also didn't know enough about when I want to come back in the summer.  But neat to think of for the future.  I had read about the whole nested trip thing but never really fully grasped its use before.

So there we go.  So far we seem to be going every 3 years so maybe this will be useful in another 3 years time :)

Hugs, 

Jen