Award redemptions are unfortunately not straightforward.
A typical OW redemption 'journey' for me involves:
- Build a 'valid' route either through Google Flights or ITA Matrix (limiting by OW airlines). This is to figure out what kind of possible routings you can get between city pairs.
- Because Enrich/AsiaMiles/most OW FFPs allow up to 5 'free' stopovers on OW redemptions, it is popular to redeem trips that have multiple destinations that are in the same region. Say if you are flying to Europe, why not hit Germany, Denmark, Sweden etc 'on the way', for the same amount of miles? Although a straightforward direct flight roundtrip is the easiest to figure out, it is definitely not the best value.
- Checking on BA.com, JAL.com, AA.com, Qantas.com for award availability through their FFP 'award search' engines. BA.com is usually the most reliable out of all. All sites have problems with phantom availability. Use these tools to figure out what airlines generally have award space available instead of going back and forth with the phone agents (it becomes VERY frustrating for both parties and the phone agent doesn't get anything for helping you).
- GCMap.com is particularly useful for calculating miles for distance based award programs like Asiamiles e.g. my upcoming trip:
http://www.gcmap.com/mapui?P=kul-pvg-nrt-bkk-kul - just nice 7114mi, just 386 miles shy of the 4,001-7,500 tier
- Once you have a set idea of the route you want, the airlines involved on the route, then it is time to call the phone agents. It's even better if you know exactly the flight number you want, not hard to find out (using Google Flights or ITA).
- Unfortunately phone agents are NOT the best people to deal with but there's no other choice. The online form goes to email and when it comes to award booking you need to lock down the booking ASAP because there's 3983249212 other people fighting for the limited award space not just from the same program but from all the other programs in OW.
- Get ready to call multiple times, be put on hold for long periods while the phone agent waits for Amadeus to (hopefully) respond to the query. I've gotten twice when the entire system went down and had to try again a week later. This is extremely frustrating because I wanted to confirm that the route I wanted is bookable and there is availability before transferring miles into my AM account from Maybank (took about 7 working days), during which one of the segments on the route I wanted became unavailable (CX, on their own flights are pretty generous with J seats, but other airlines usually only 'release' 2). Basically a lot of waiting.
- Once the stars align (every segment on your route is available and your miles are in your account), the agent can book and issue ticket straight away. This will 'hold' the itinerary and you can proceed to make payment for the taxes. Once you get an email with your booking ref./PNR (the 6 letter combination), you can go to the respective airlines website to check that the PNR is indeed valid (go to "Manage your booking", enter last name and PNR). The airlines website should allow you to select seats, even.
- If you get a stupid agent, hang up and try again.
Good luck!
Im confused. Based on GCMap for your route, its 7114 miles and supposingly it fall into Award Zone D (5001 - 7,500), which required 120,000AM for biz return, but ur earlier post u said its 80,000AM+tax to redeem, which is only Award Zone C (2,501 - 5,000)?
Feb 11 2015, 02:49 PM
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and yup, there were once we all met up in KLIA PPL, all using my cards 
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