AWARD TICKETS HIDDEN CITY TICKETING

In the previous installment we talked about how Hidden City Revenue Ticket can be booked. Let's see how we can apply the same to book award tickets with hidden city which can either reduced the "fuel surcharges" or the "number of miles" required for the award. Below are the traits of booking such an award:

• Certain cities which "cap" fuel surcharge (think Hong Kong) when you are flying in to them.
• Certain regions that prohibit fuel surcharges on the revenue tickets (think S. America) and thus "remove fuel surcharge" from award tickets.
• Routing which requires flying through the airline "hub" where the "hub" lies in the different region then the "source/destination" pair region.

Lets see the usage of above with few examples:

Going from South Asia to Central Asia using United Miles:
United typically charges 35k/60k/110k miles in Economy/Business/First respectively for travel between South Asia region and Central Asia region yet it only charges 20k/35k/45k miles for travel wholly within "South Asia" region. As you can see from below a trip from Kathmandu (KTM) to Bangkok (BKK) requires 35k miles in Economy and 60k

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KTM-BKK cost is 35k/60k miles in Economy/Business

Now, lets try one of the "hidden city" concept to see if we can reduce the price. Let's see what happens if we change our destination to Colombo (CMB) which is in South Asia region.

KTM-BKK-(CMB) cost is 20k/35k miles in Economy/Business

As you can see from above the mileage cost has reduced from 35k/60k to 20k/35k and you are still travelling via Bangkok (BKK). The idea here is you can book the flight from Kathmandu to Colombo via Bangkok and can get down at Bangkok as long as you do not have any checked-in Bags and have "visa" for Colombo (you will need Colombo visa to board the flight from Kathmandu).

Going from North America to South Pacific using Delta Skymiles:
Most of you would consider Delta Skymiles to be useless but one of the sweet redemption is travelling to Australia on Virgin Australia using Delta Skymiles. You can only book Delta flights round trip but can have one-stop  over and one open-jaw in the route. Ideally Delta would charge 100k/160k in Economy/Business to fly Australia as shown below:

LAX-SYD-LAX would cost 100k miles in Economy using Delta Skymiles

Lets now change to destination in some other region where Virgin Australia flies. How about some another vacation spot? If you change the destination to Bali (DPS) which is in Southeast Asia you can reduce the mileage cost to 80k/140k in Economy/Business as shown below:

LAX-SYD-DPS-SYD-LAX would cost 80k miles in Economy using Delta Skymiles with free stop-over in Sydney

As you can see there are quite a few opportunities which reduces the mileage cost with the help of "Hidden City Ticketing". On similar lines changing the destination to something which has "low fuel surcharge" when booking through mileage currency from programs such as ANA or Aeroplan which typically levies fuel surchage can provide good amount of savings. 

So, look around for such opportunities before you book your next vacation.