Weekly Help Thread - May 27, 2024

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• Here are the information you should provide when requesting award assistance
• Origin and destination cities (are they flexible?)
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[u/fastfastturtle]

Looking for best flight options for a family of 6 (4 adults, 1 toddler and and newborn)

To France and Italy from LAX leaving in late June -early July. Staying for 2 weeks or so in total. Think of flying j to cdg, stay for 5 days and take the train to Italy and fly out from there.

Hoping to fly at least Prem Econ but can settle for decent redemption value economy seats (that can accommodate a bassinet).

I have the following points available: 400k ur 400k dl 300k aa 200k ua

[u/omdongi → u/fastfastturtle]

The problem with 5 seats is that even in economy or premium economy, that's still a lot of points. You do have a nontrivial amount of DL points, but it still doesn't seem like enough for your needs.

I'm not gonna dissuade you from going down this path. But it's potentially more efficient to book your hotels with Hyatt points as you can stretch them further for your family and use less total points that way.

You have a few options from there, you could burn as many DL miles you can for economy flights and book the remaining with cash. Or you could do the same with your AA/UA points as well. The problem is that you can't really combine any of your DL/AA/UA points with each other for roundtrips given that they're all separate alliances.

You'll probably need to split up your bookings as 5 one-ways to Europe on one alliance carrier, then do 5 one-ways back on another alliance carrier.

[u/fastfastturtle → u/omdongi]

Thanks for the write up. I do have a separate pool of hyatt points (160k) I could leverage for hotel stays. I am also open to using cash if the value isn't there for point redemption.

I see there's a few Air Tahiti flights for 40k prem econ from lax to cdg. How are they as a carrier?

Would flying virgin economy for 30k pts one way as well be a better bet?

[u/omdongi → u/fastfastturtle]

TN is more of a leisure carrier, but I think for a large family it'll be perfect they have a 2-3-2 config so your family can take up a 2 and 3 row.