ANA
I've been praising ANA's current award chart a lot, and recently praising their soon to be award chart as well. But ANA isn't just useful for booking Star Alliance awards, it's useful for finding Star Alliance award availability. ANA is known to be the best for showing accurate seats. I'll show you how to search for flights (even if you don't have miles in the account), how to book stopovers, and then compare, how much better is it really.
If you're new to ANA, this is great for anyone who wants to learn how to search...
Read moreLast night I wrote a post of breaking news with ANA's award chart changing. It was cool because I was certainly the first of the blogs to post anything about the program changes, and the first to post any of the English translations for the regions (although FT eventual came up with some English names for the zone (but no definitions)). Basically, I had to use a program to get the Japanese texts from the images, and then translate that using google.
My findings were some huge redemptions. The cheapest business class flights to Europe, the cheapest econ and biz flights to Africa,...
Read moreSome big news that isn't bad news! ANA is changing from a distance based program to a region based program again, starting April 12, 2015 (I think). I've said multiple times in the last months that ANA is the most underrated award chart out there. When doing many comparisons, like Best Miles to Europe, ANA consistently has the best prices in Economy and Business. But the new award chart is even better in some areas and is now zone based instead of distance based.
I spent the last couple of hours trying to translate images and texts we have to english, and...
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Over and over and over again, I compare prices across the mileage board and ANA has the best prices. And it's totally an option for any mileage collector because of transfer opportunities. Yet, it's hardly used or talked about.
Even better! It's a little known fact that you get 4 stopovers with ANA! That means a trip planned for one city could have stops as long as you want in 3 other cities.
The only downside is the fuel surcharges, and you can avoid those!
Here's a how-to for finding, pricing, using, and maximizing ANA miles.
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