Award Ticket Tip: Use Wikipedia to Research Flight Routes

The real problem

Many readers who know a bit about award tickets have probably noticed that for some itineraries—for example, a ticket from A to B—searching directly from origin A to destination B on many award search engines does not return every possible routing. (Anyone who has studied CS should know that the problem of finding flight paths between A and B is basically the Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP), which is NP-Complete. In theory, there is no deterministic linear-time algorithm for it. In other words, a search engine cannot possibly return every possible path in a short amount of time.)

At times like this, we need to manually look for possible routings between A and B and then check whether each segment has award availability. If you find a routing where every segment has award space, and it also complies with the award rules of the airline program whose miles you are using, then you may be able to ticket it by calling customer service.

But as consumers, how do we know what possible routings exist between A and B? One surprisingly effective solution is to make smart use of Wikipedia. Below, chanye will show you how to find these routings.

How to do it

1. Identify which airlines your miles can be used to book (for example, Japan Airlines, JAL) and their corresponding hubs (for example, Tokyo Narita NRT / Tokyo Haneda HND / Osaka Kansai KIX / Nagoya NGO)
2. Find that airline’s destinations in the relevant country (for example, the US)
3. Find the airline’s flights from the relevant airport (for example, JAL flights from LAX, such as LAX-NRT)
4. Check whether those flights have award availability

Finding eligible airlines and their hubs

In several of our previous posts (Introduction to Airline Alliances, How to Redeem Award Tickets to Go Back to China During Peak Season? (oneworld Edition), How to Redeem Award Tickets to Go Back to China During Peak Season? (Star Alliance Edition)), we repeatedly mentioned that you need to think in terms of alliances when booking award tickets. So how can you quickly check which airlines belong to each alliance? Very simple: Wikipedia can help.

Let’s use oneworld as an example to introduce this simple and practical trick.

• First, open the Wikipedia entry for oneworld. (I recommend using the English version of Wikipedia because it is generally maintained more professionally and updated more frequently, so the information tends to be more accurate.)

• Then click “3. 1 Full members and their affiliates,” or scroll down to that subsection, and you will see all current oneworld members

• Now use your geography knowledge and think about which airlines in the table might be relevant between your origin and destination. (For example, on a China-US route, that would naturally include JAL and American Airlines, AA.)
• Then click on one of the airlines (for example, American Airlines). On the right side of the page, you can see that airline’s hubs

• Some readers may ask: why do we need to know an airline’s hubs? The answer is that most traditional airlines operate on a hub-and-spoke model. They typically schedule a large number of flights from their hubs, and one end of an international route is often one of that airline’s hubs. So knowing an airline’s hubs is extremely important.

Finding an airline’s destinations in a specific country

Once we know which airlines we can book with our miles, how do we figure out which routes those airlines operate for the trip we want—say, between China and the US? Once again, Wikipedia can help.

Below, we’ll use American Airlines (AA), Japan Airlines (JAL), and Cathay Pacific (CX) as examples. Let’s assume we want to redeem an award ticket between China and the US, and see how to identify usable routes.

• On the American Airlines Wikipedia page, find the “Destinations” section and click “American Airlines destinations” to open the next page

• On the “American Airlines destinations” page, click Country to sort the list alphabetically by country

• Then scroll down to the country or region you care about (for example, CHINA), and you can see exactly which cities American Airlines serves there

• Here we can see that AA has very few destinations in mainland China—only two major cities. So let’s see what destinations it has in Japan, since connecting in Japan can also be a good option.

• And then we find: WTF! AA has only one destination in Japan! Clearly that is not enough and leaves very little flexibility. But Japan is JAL’s home turf, so let’s take a look at how many destinations JAL has in the US. The method is the same; just switch the airline to JAL.

• Doesn’t life suddenly look much better? JAL has so many destinations in the US! Although the gray ones have already been discontinued, the active destinations still include Boston, Chicago, Honolulu, Los Angeles, New York JFK, San Diego, and San Francisco—seven in total. And according to this table, Dallas service would resume by year-end! Exciting, right? Likewise, JAL also serves quite a few destinations in China.

• I’m really jealous of readers in Beijing, Dalian, Guangzhou, Shanghai, and Tianjin—JAL can take you practically to your doorstep. Next, let’s look at the Hong Kong carriers Cathay Pacific and Dragonair.

• Cathay also serves Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, New York JFK, New York EWR, and San Francisco in the US—six destinations. Now let’s look at its mainland China coverage.

• Quite a lot, right? One thing to note: for mainland China service, Cathay/Dragonair flights are generally operated by Dragonair (KA). Cathay itself only serves two mainland cities, but Dragonair KA, as a subsidiary of Cathay Pacific CX, is also a oneworld member, so there is no difference when redeeming within the alliance.

Finding an airline’s flights at a specific airport

In the previous step, we learned how to use Wikipedia to find an airline’s destinations in a given country. But how can we tell which specific route that airline operates from a particular airport? Once again, Wikipedia can help.

Let’s use New York JFK and Honolulu HNL as examples to look up available JAL flights.

• First, go to the Wikipedia entry for New York JFK, scroll to the “Airlines and destinations” section, and find “Japan Airlines”

• Then we can see that JAL operates the Tokyo Narita NRT - New York JFK route. The next step is to use an award search engine to check availability. Some readers may think there’s no need to go through all this trouble because surely JAL’s US routes all depart from Tokyo Narita—but that is not necessarily true. Let’s look at Honolulu HNL as an example.

• We can see that JAL serves Honolulu HNL from Nagoya NGO, Osaka Kansai KIX, Tokyo Haneda HND, and Tokyo Narita NRT. And as a nice bonus, we also discover that Air China (CA) operates the Beijing PEK - Honolulu HNL route. If you are booking Star Alliance awards, that is very useful information too.

Summary

Wikipedia is an extremely powerful reference tool. If you use it creatively, it can significantly improve your success rate when booking award tickets. Hopefully, especially when you feel stuck, the method in this post can help you solve the problem in front of you.