If there’s one mileage currency I want to burn it’s Delta SkyMiles. Their miles are probably at the highest risk of devaluing soon, so I’m always looking for good ways to redeem them. Previously Air France business class was the best way to redeem SkyMiles given how much award space they released, though since at least the beginning of the year they’ve only been releasing a tiny subset of award space to partner airlines, and in many cases are blocking out availability for months at a time.
Meanwhile the options for redeeming SkyMiles when traveling to Asia and Australia have gotten progressively better.
To Asia, China Southern started A380 service between Los Angeles and Guangzhou last year, and not only do they have an excellent business class product, but they release a ton of award space. Meanwhile as of last October, Korean Air awards can be booked on delta.com. Previously it was a real pain, given that you were at the mercy of SkyMiles agents to both search and book Korean Air award space.
Awards to Australia have gotten much more lucrative as well, because as of last September Delta stopped imposing fuel surcharges on Virgin Australia, the airline that releases the most business class award space between the US and Australia. That’s a savings of about $800 per award ticket.
Anyway, the fun thing about awards with Delta to Australia is that you’re allowed to route via Asia assuming it’s a published routing. So for travel between the US and Australia/New Zealand you can fly Virgin Australia direct to Brisbane, Melbourne, or Sydney, Air Tahiti Nui through Tahiti, China Southern through Guangzhou, Korean Air through Seoul Incheon, etc.
All legal routings between the US and Australia using SkyMiles
Now, to the point of this post — as of October 27, 2013, China Southern will be launching their second longhaul A380 route, with daily service between Guangzhou and Sydney.
The A380 service will operate with the following schedule:
CZ325 Guangzhou to Sydney 9:05PM-9:30AM (+1 day)
CZ326 Sydney to Guangzhou 10:50AM-5:00PM
The first thing that jumped out at me is that they plan on turning the A380 in 80 minutes. Good luck with that, China Southern.
As a point of reference, their A380 service between Guangzhou and Los Angeles operates on the following schedule:
CZ327 Guangzhou to Los Angeles 9:30PM-7:00PM
CZ328 Los Angeles to Guangzhou 11:00PM-5:20AM (+2 days)
So as you can see the connections are timed much better if traveling from Sydney to Los Angeles via Guangzhou than the other way around. So if you’re looking at doing a routing like this, it might be worth doing Virgin Australia on the outbound, for example, and then China Southern on the return. That’s assuming you don’t want a stopover in China, which would require a visa if for over 24 hours.
I consider this to be a pretty exciting new service, and award availability on the whole seems to be excellent, even in peak season. There seem to be up to six or so business class award seats per flight on average, which is excellent, and can be booked for 150,000 Delta SkyMiles roundtrip.
Meanwhile if you wanted to book first class, you could redeem Korean Air SkyPass miles, at the rate of 240,000 miles for a roundtrip in first class. While you could book a one-way for travel on Korean Air, for travel on partner airlines roundtrip travel is required.
Lastly, it’s worth noting that China Southern does impose mild fuel surcharges, regardless of whether you book through Delta or Korean Air. On a one-way that totals roughly ~$170 per business class ticket, which isn’t half bad in my book.
(Tip of the hat to Hack My Trip)
@ Ben -- You can actually stop there. You're allowed one stopover on a roundtrip.
@ John -- Because it's very likely they'll be going for revenue based redemptions at some point.
@ JRL -- Your next connection point has to be internationally -- you can't be connecting within China, so that wouldn't be valid.
On the topic of ways to use your SkyMiles, China Eastern has excellent award availability (according to Airfrance.us at least) on trans-Pacific flights. Their product looks quite old and tired, but there is wide-open availability for business class seats on JFK-PVG, for example, and there are few to no other ways to get low-award-level access to Asia from New York using SkyMiles. (KE seems to open nearly no seats on its JFK services, which is...
On the topic of ways to use your SkyMiles, China Eastern has excellent award availability (according to Airfrance.us at least) on trans-Pacific flights. Their product looks quite old and tired, but there is wide-open availability for business class seats on JFK-PVG, for example, and there are few to no other ways to get low-award-level access to Asia from New York using SkyMiles. (KE seems to open nearly no seats on its JFK services, which is annoying since many of them go out with lots of empty J seats in their huge upper deck A380 cabin; China Southern is hard to access because of how hard it is to get low award level flights between NY and LA.)
When you say you can route via Asia to Australia from the US, do you mean that you can actually visit the country (e.g. China) before flying to Australia? Or do you mean just connect via that city? If the latter, what's the point?
Why do you consider SkyMiles at greatest risk of devaluing when they are already so low?
If your prediction comes to pass, I'd basically say there is kinda no point in collecting SkyMiles unless one's travel is almost exclusively in and out of a Delta hub.
http://www.cnto.org/guangzhou-announces-72-hour-visa-free-stay/
@ ttt and/or David and/or Lucky —
Can we confirm that this policy is or isn't void if there is a connection included during the transit period. Eg. JFK-PEK (connection) PVG (stop <72 hours) NRT (dest)?
@ RM -- Thanks, though unless I'm missing something that article only references Beijing and Shanghai, no?
Here's the info on the 72-hr visa: http://losangeles.china-consulate.org/eng/visa/chinavisa/t1046149.htm
My company has also made us aware of this as well. Good stuff for quick meetings.
Lucky, as a Chinese I can confirm this is true. 72hr visa free policy applies to PEK PVG, CAN and soon CTU.
@ David -- Wow, thanks for the heads up, that's really exciting! Would love to write a post about this as I didn't know this before, though only source I can find is this unofficial China travel guide:
http://www.travelchinaguide.com/embassy/visa/transit.htm
Know of any official source that mentions this? Figured I would've been able to at least find an article about it, but haven't found anything.
lucky, from June of 2013, Guangzhou will grant visa-free stay of up to 72 hours while in transiting through Guangzhou Baiyun Airport (CAN) for the below countries.
Argentina, Austria, Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Brunei, Bulgaria, Canada, Chile, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Mexico, Netherlands, New Zealand, Poland, Portugal, Qatar, Romania, Russia, Singapore, Slovakia, Slovenia, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, United Arab Emirates,...
lucky, from June of 2013, Guangzhou will grant visa-free stay of up to 72 hours while in transiting through Guangzhou Baiyun Airport (CAN) for the below countries.
Argentina, Austria, Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Brunei, Bulgaria, Canada, Chile, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Mexico, Netherlands, New Zealand, Poland, Portugal, Qatar, Romania, Russia, Singapore, Slovakia, Slovenia, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, United Arab Emirates, Ukraine, United Kingdom, United States.
@ dan -- Are you looking at Dubai (DXB) or Dublin (DUB)? If the former, then yes, you should be fine going via Europe in one direction and Asia the other.
Hi Ben
I have a unrelated question. I want to book an award trip to dubai with my us airway miles so I'm looking at lax-jfk-fra-DUB.
For the flight back, is it legal routing to go east such as DUB-NRT-LAX or do I have to fly back through europe?
Thank you!
@ Duncan -- No, they only fly to Auckland as far as I know.
Does Air Tahiti Nui still fly syd-ppt maybe seasonally? Otherwise they code share with Qantas or Air NZ metal. SYD is a bit of an A380 hub but 80 minute turnaround then again it's CXN.