Travelling to Hong Kong in January 2023 - need help with award finding

Flights & Airfares
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Hi Brainstrust!
Been helping many people with award searches but just personally don’t have the time or energy to find some good options to my own travels to Hong Kong in January next year. I’m asking for some help from you all to pull your brain power together and brainstorm some options that fit the following requirements:

  • Return trip Brisbane to Hong Kong and back (departure from Brisbane is non-negotiable)
  • 2 Week minimum departing anytime from the first week of January and returning before the 3rd of Feb.
  • 2 Adults
  • Economy or Business (although Business is obviously much prefered :wink: )
  • Use Qantas Points (OneWorld and other partners), Velocity or Singapore Airlines points

I had a quick look at the obvious Virgin and Singapore airlines websites and didn’t find anything too appealing.
Happy to provide extra guidance if needed! Have fun hunting!!

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Good day, djtech.

What a pleasant surprise to find a post from you. =D

Are you open to a non-direct flight (e.g. via Singapore)? Not ideal but I saw some Economy Advantage for BNE-SIN (4 Jan - 3 Feb).

Edit: Cathay flights didn’t come obvious when searching on Google Flights so either they are more expensive or haven’t come back yet.

I saw some revenue flights for A$1222 via Singapore so might not be great value for your pts used. A$2800 in business class via Manila. Not a terrible price if you keen to use your pts on something that is of more value.

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Hey @djtech

Never thought I’d see a post that I can help with from Point Hacks Community royalty, but here we are :wink:

Will breakdown into OW and Star Alliance segments for ease of reading:

For OW, could only find some flights departing 18 Jan from BNE - PER (QF) then PER - HKG (CY), with the CY leg in premium economy, but thats the earliest I can find any OW flights to HKG, let alone non-economy legs. This was on the AA website, as Qantas is experiencing technical difficulties with their own website/app - can’t login to QFF.

In terms of flights returning from HKG, the first awards that appear on AA atleast are not until 26 Feb, Obviously not ideal.

For Star Alliance/Virgin
Nothing on Virgin Australia’s website, but have found decent business award availability on SQ and partners. As an example:
For SQ only:

18 Jan - BNE - SIN - 23:25 → 05:05 on SQ 246, then SIN - HKG - 13:05 → 17:05 on SQ 894 (8hr connection time)

5 Feb - HKG - SIN - 18:50 → 22:50 on SQ 895, then SIN - BNE - 00:55 → 10:45 on SQ 255 (2hr 5 min connection time)

Total = 286,000 KF miles + ~450 in taxes.

N.B there is some Business Advantage availability on the 12th, 13th and 14th of Jan, but thats the earliest I can find.

For Partners, EVA was easily most plentiful:

EVA - BNE - HKG via TPE, available on the 7th, 10th, 11th and 17th of Jan 81,500 KF miles + taxes each person.

EVA - HKG - BNE via TPE, available on 29th & 31st Jan, 01 & 02 Feb, with same cost as above.

Hope this helps, and happy hunting!

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Thank you both! Locked in travel with EVA on the way out and SG biz on the way back. Made this process a lot quicker and less time consuming. Love it when crowdsourcing works.

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Winning! I learnt something along the way too.

@mctaggartw I was having a play on AA earlier and kept getting error out. Is there a secret to searching for the above and for Star Alliance? I’m very rusty on this and very not travel fit too =(.

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@w.hiew I’m sure your skills will be back to form in no time!

With AA for the first leg to HKG, I also errored out when searching, but did a search for May, to see if there was any awards at all, and that populated, and so just manually checked the previous months on the calendar till I got to Jan, which only had awards from the 18th. My guess is it doesn’t like it when searching for dates when there aren’t any flights scheduled? Not sure. Same when looking for HKG - BNE.

For Star Alliance, just gotta make sure you’re using the star alliance tab on the SQ website, rather than just Singapore Airlines - its up the top of the page, above the 7-day date range and but below the edit search functionality - you can switch between SQ, Star Alliance and Other Partners

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Cool. Thanks for explaning.

Back in the day, it used to be United for searching Star alliance award space as they have a calendar view.

AA was good in that sense too.

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Tbh I’ve found that for redeeming Krisflyer miles SQ’s wesbite is just generally more accurate. Haven’t really used United’s website all that much though. I guess the same thing with Qantas & AA. Just wish that programs would move to a calendar search tool in general - would make life so much easier!

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Singapore Air always plays games with award availability and almost never release business class to other Star Alliance members. At least their website aint too bad!

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Hey all!
Unfortunate to note that EVA Air cancelled their flight from Brisbane to Taipei on 4 Jan so now I’m stuck with my connection to Hong Kong in limbo. I booked with Krisflyer and I so far have (quite luckily) never encountered a situation like this before.
They have proactively offered a flight leaving on the 5th to taipei but then over 24 hours connection time at Taipei as the next flight to Hong Kong with award availability is on the 7th.
Other than that, there isn’t any viable option that the lady on the phone could offer. So I’m taking a wait and see approach.
If you have any suggestions how to tackle this, let me know! Also, anyone been in this situation before with Singapore Air? How flexible were they in terms of opening up their own flights?