LD gave me a two-week break, which let me go out and splurge on a trip. I’m infinitely grateful!
As the saying goes, it takes a thousand days to prepare and just one day to deploy, so my ticket-hunting journey began.
Since I planned to depart directly from DC this time, I set my target on CA (Air China). I know some people might want to start trashing CA, but I’m not doing it on purpose. I have flown CA business before, and to be honest I never felt like sharing it much. There’s no absolute worst—just worse and worse. For direct flights out of IAD, besides CA, there’s also United.
I know, with my laziness and unwillingness to deal with too many connections, I had to choose between those two options.
I first opened the UA app and found there were still quite a few flights departing soon. Even better, UA had its own first class at only 80,000, and business class at 70,000.
It was honestly nice—peak-summer gloom vanished.
But now take a look at UA 772’s two cabins.
First class is a 1-2-1 layout, equivalent to CX business class, while business is a shocking 2-4-2. Keep in mind economy has only 9 seats per row—what kind of "two-cabin" setup is that?
And even more outrageous, there was even that brain-dead, feet-touching, eye-contact-ish business cabin setup.
Another CA business configuration is 2-2-2 on the 77W, and 80,000 points can get business. Service looked about the same, but the food should definitely be more to my taste.
But I only had 150,000 points, so I could only choose the 80,000 + 70,000 way of booking.
That meant no matter what I did on my outbound, the return had to include one segment where I’d have to weave past another person to get to the restroom.
After losing a day, I suddenly remembered I had forgotten one key ally in Star Alliance: All Nippon Airways (ANA).
It’s currently ANA R season, so a round-trip with them alone requires only 90,000. Since I didn’t want extra connections, I needed 95,000.
Very reasonable.
Before transferring points, I checked ANA first and found there were CA round-trip flights on the dates I could choose from.
In other words, 95,000 MR points could get me UA value worth 160,000, which is a very good deal.
Note: ANA can only be booked round-trip.
I quickly transferred from MR. The server estimated up to 7 days, which really scared the heck out of me.
The next day I called support, and they said they couldn’t help.
Fortunately, the points arrived early on the third day.
I happily opened the award search page and found that the tickets I found two days earlier were all gone.
Such a tragedy: with UA search I can see them, but with ANA I can only see two- or three-stop flights.
I tried calling support, and the response was that they can’t see any flights at all.
After thinking it through, I found the issue: support can’t see any direct or connecting CA flights.
In the end, I booked a round-trip CA for a week later. Yes, it could be ticketed online, but support still couldn’t see it.
From my own hands-on experience, here are a few ANA ticketing issues I found:
1. Customer service is shockingly...so inefficient, but maybe it’s not exactly their fault.
2. When building itineraries with mult, I often run into availability search errors.
3. CA 738 has only two cabins, but ANA sells the business cabin as first class, so ANA has many fewer options than UA, and that segment is actually economy class.
I don’t know if other airlines do this too. This is the pitfall of it all.
If your itinerary is a bit flexible and you have room to search a few days before or after, you can directly book a round-trip. Even if you don’t mind one or two short sectors being economy, ANA is a very good-value option within Star Alliance.
Now I’ll share something that just happened.
I had just tried to change the date. ANA allows free date changes if you don’t change the flight, so I gave searching again a shot and called support. The rep’s system still couldn’t see any CA tickets.
I told him I had called right after searching.
The rep said tickets found online can’t be issued—they are what they call “ghost tickets.”
But I said they have to be issueable—I literally just issued one.
After that, the rep said the system works this way and there’s nothing they can do.
I post this as a DP to warn everyone: reward swaps carry risk. Be very careful when transferring points.