Award travel to Hawaii

Here I am like a fish out of water planning a land trip to Hawaii.

My husband and I each have 20,000 plus miles on United from our flight to Diamond Princess Asian cruise. Award travel is available for 20K one way. How do I book this and then how do you price the return trip. Return trip one way is more expensive than roundtrip!!:rolleyes: If you could advise on how to do this flight would sure appreciate.

Don't waste your miles on a one way ticket then pay a fortune for the return - buy a return ticket with money, it's better value, and earn more miles so that you might have enough for a return trip in the future. Or you could look at using your miles for an upgrade; I'm not familiar with United's mileage programme so I can't guess if they'll have plenty of upgrade availability, some airlines don't.

Here I am like a fish out of water planning a land trip to Hawaii.

My husband and I each have 20,000 plus miles on United from our flight to Diamond Princess Asian cruise. Award travel is available for 20K one way. How do I book this and then how do you price the return trip. Return trip one way is more expensive than roundtrip!!:rolleyes: If you could advise on how to do this flight would sure appreciate.

This is very, very simple. If you only have 20,000 miles each, why not find flights where there is award availability for departure and return? Use your miles to book your outbound, and your husband's miles to book your return. Then simply purchase his ticket with cash.

You can pay the phone fee and work with an agent to do this, or first you'll have to log into your account and book with your miles, and then log into his account to use his.

I agree with 6rugrats. That is the simple solution.

This is very, very simple. If you only have 20,000 miles each, why not find flights where there is award availability for departure and return? Use your miles to book your outbound, and your husband's miles to book your return. Then simply purchase his ticket with cash.

 

You can pay the phone fee and work with an agent to do this, or first you'll have to log into your account and book with your miles, and then log into his account to use his.

This will indeed work. Thinking of any time in October so flights still available both ways. Pretty neat to get one roundtrip free and the other for less than $750 for that far.

We decided to try and merge our points and then buy one ticket with cash.

It doesn't work. As of now, it costs $15 per 1000 points to transfer your points to another account. The limit per year is 15,000 the smallest payment is 20,000 points (for where I wanted to go). So I can spend $300 and be only 2,000 points short of a round trip ticket. I can buy a one way return ticket at $700 something X 2 or I can grab the $619 roundtrip non stop flight out of EWR and be totally disgusted with United Airlines and their policies that make me not want to fly them because I "feel" cheated on and instead of happy I went to angry. Worthless old points!!:mad:

We decided to try and merge our points and then buy one ticket with cash.

It doesn't work. As of now, it costs $15 per 1000 points to transfer your points to another account. The limit per year is 15,000 the smallest payment is 20,000 points (for where I wanted to go). So I can spend $300 and be only 2,000 points short of a round trip ticket. I can buy a one way return ticket at $700 something X 2 or I can grab the $619 roundtrip non stop flight out of EWR and be totally disgusted with United Airlines and their policies that make me not want to fly them because I "feel" cheated on and instead of happy I went to angry. Worthless old points!!:mad:

You're overcomplicating this.

United awards are one-way. So, you book one way with your points, then your husband uses his points to book the other way in your name. No need to merge/transfer anything.

We decided to try and merge our points and then buy one ticket with cash.

It doesn't work. As of now, it costs $15 per 1000 points to transfer your points to another account. The limit per year is 15,000 the smallest payment is 20,000 points (for where I wanted to go). So I can spend $300 and be only 2,000 points short of a round trip ticket. I can buy a one way return ticket at $700 something X 2 or I can grab the $619 roundtrip non stop flight out of EWR and be totally disgusted with United Airlines and their policies that make me not want to fly them because I "feel" cheated on and instead of happy I went to angry. Worthless old points!!:mad:

I explained very clearly how to do this in post #3. I did not tell you to try and tranfer points, that's a ridiculous waste of money and not necessary. You are not paying attention on how to do this. YOU DON'T TRANSFER OR "MERGE" POINTS TO EACH OTHER'S ACCOUNT!

Try again. Find an outbound and return flight that are available for 20,000 miles each. Log into your MP account. Book the outbound for you using your miles and pay the $5.00 in taxes. Log out. Log into your husband's MP account. Book the return for you using his miles, pay the $5.00 in taxes. Done. Then purchase a ticket for your husband on the same flights. It's not hard, you are just making it very difficult for some reason.

You feel "cheated" because you don't understand what you are doing, I am guessing. UA is one of the easiest airlines on which to use your points.

If you can't figure out how to do it, and don't want to use a phone agent and truly feel your 40,000 points are worthless, you may feel free to give them to me :).

We decided to try and merge our points and then buy one ticket with cash.

It doesn't work. As of now, it costs $15 per 1000 points to transfer your points to another account. The limit per year is 15,000 the smallest payment is 20,000 points (for where I wanted to go). So I can spend $300 and be only 2,000 points short of a round trip ticket. I can buy a one way return ticket at $700 something X 2 or I can grab the $619 roundtrip non stop flight out of EWR and be totally disgusted with United Airlines and their policies that make me not want to fly them because I "feel" cheated on and instead of happy I went to angry. Worthless old points!!:mad:

Use the miles to purchase one person round trip and pay for the other one in cash.. You don't need to transfer them to make the purchase. 6rugrats explained very clearly how to do this. I have "purchased" award tickets in my husbands name using my points.

Thanks to all of you. We are now going to Hawaii Oct. 15! Part of the problem with this booking was that in transferring old Mileage Plus numbers to new accounts of course the information was all wrong and out of date. The important part was that the miles did get recorded and by sticking to it we got 2 one way award tickets and bought the other roundtrip ticket for a total outlay of less than $1000 for 2 in economy plus for non-stop flight EWR to HNL. Pretty good price I think :):)

Thanks to all of you. We are now going to Hawaii Oct. 15! Part of the problem with this booking was that in transferring old Mileage Plus numbers to new accounts of course the information was all wrong and out of date. The important part was that the miles did get recorded and by sticking to it we got 2 one way award tickets and bought the other roundtrip ticket for a total outlay of less than $1000 for 2 in economy plus for non-stop flight EWR to HNL. Pretty good price I think :):)

Great!

OT - are you a Ravens fan? My father was at the Superbowl yesterday. He is so happy finally getting to go after being a season ticket holder for over 50 years.

In this area of Maryland, you can be switch hitters -- and 2nd chanchers! If your main squeeze does not do it, your have a backup! :) You can even have 2 sets of sweatshirts like my neighbors -- she works in Baltimore schools he works in DC office. The kids know they are really Giants fans but they like the other teams too. No loyalty on carpetbaggers:p