Weddingbee boards

We're getting married on a Saturday, 9/29, and wanted to leave for our honeymoon the following Monday, 10/1. We planned on flying from Philly to Maui.

The other day we were looking on American Airlines website we saw that to use our supersaver economy seats, we could only leave on Tuesday, 10/2. We decided that 1 extra day at home would be worth it, and we decided to figure out a return date and book soon.

Well, we log on tonight and nearly the entire month is unavailable at our points range going from Philly to Maui. Very upsetting. It's looking like if we want to go to Maui, we'll have to wait a few WEEKS, or wait a few days and leave from Newark international (a 2.5 hour drive) at some ridiculous hour of the morning, taking a total of 3 flights and getting us into Maui at 935pm local time.

The only thing we can do is obsessively check back every day to see if anything else pops up.

Has anyone else been in this situation? Did it work out for you?

Does anyone have any other reccomendations for a honeymoon? We want some combo of beach and adventure, so we had looked into the Carribean and Central and S. America as well,  but it was either rainy season or not warm enough to swim in many of the locations we had considered.

Thoughts or advice?

Thanks :)

Have you looked at if there's availability into Honolulu? I could be wrong, but I suspect that there are not as many flights into Maui, and that could be what's messing up your plans. Inter-island flights are not as cheap as they should be, but you'd still save a lot of money if you could do super-saver to Honolulu and then book a separate paid ticket Honolulu to Maui.

You also do still have time, and award inventory comes and goes completely randomly--the fact that there's nothing available now does NOT mean nothing will ever be available for the dates you want. Early October should not be that busy a period. Check the AA website often. I'd give it a few months before giving up and changing destinations. (Having said that, we did change destinations--we were hoping to book business or first class awards to Australia and set up all sorts of alerts to check for us daily once the window opened up, but nothing we liked came up for three months or so, so we switched to going to Europe.)

@Frog E.: Thanks for the advice :)

We actually looked into flying to another island... but everyhting appeared to be the same. It sounds like we'll just have to be patient and keep our fingers crossed and check back often. Hope you enjoy your Eurotrip!

im bumping this for daytime people.... any ideas?

Oh, also--I don't know if you have enough miles that you would be able to book a standard economy award. But if you do, and you'd consider booking that way, PLEASE check first to see if there's business super-saver available. Business super-saver costs the same as economy standard, and is sometimes available even if economy super-saver isn't. 

And if you're doing AA, with the first leg on the return an overnight flight, see if you can route through Dallas Fort Worth. That's a long enough flight that you can actually get some sleep on it if you sleep on planes. The overnight flights to LA don't leave you much time to sleep and you end up in LA at an ungodly hour.

@abbie017: So far it looks like flying out of DC/Baltimore or Newark/NYC are our best options. We're actually holding a flight right now that goes out of Dulles. I'll do it as a last resort, but it's so frustrating when I have an airport 20 minutes from my house!!

@hotchildinthecity: it's funny you mention that. we have considered Aruba, and I vetoed it over Hawaii because I feel like there is a possibilty that I would maybe vacation there again at some point in my life. As much as I'm complaining about long travel times and my hatred of airplanes, the reason we went with Hawaii was because we don't forsee ourselves ever going to Hawaii again. Aye. But if Hawaii falls through I think Aruba is a top contender because of the time of year we're traveling.

@julies1949: I had no idea I could do that! I'll check it out.

@Frog E.: unfortunately, we only have enough miles for "economy milesaaver offpeak". and that's a good tip about the flights, hopefully something like that will pop it. it's looking like our front runner is: dulles to seattle, seattle to sacramento, sacramento to maui. lots and lots o' layovers. siiiigh.

Thanks everyone :)

Hopefully something will come through where you can book it with just one stop!

Re: booking with partner airlines, you could see if either Hawaiian Airlines or Alaskan Airlines have availability. The only issue there is that you can't book partner awards on line: you have to call American Airlines, which will then mean you have to pay a $25 service charge for using the phone. (Go figure, you can't book them online, but then they charge you for not booking them on line... what a racket.)

Using airline miles can be SO frustrating! I am with Star Alliance so I don't know how much help I can specifically be about AA, but check out the flyertalk website. They have incredibly knowledgeable posts about ANYTHING you might want to know about your miles, and there are frequent expert posters who can assist you with questions. 

I do know that for our honeymoon, we literally got our flights using miles the day that they were available (I think about 330 days out). It's crazy but sometimes you have to bend over backwards to get those hard-earned miles in use...good luck!

OP, how's it going? Any luck with tickets?

@Frog E.:  I just saw this- thanks for checking back in with me :)

We ended up finding a flight the monday after our saturday wedding out of Newark, at 740am!

We fly to Seattle, then Sacramento, then Maui. After we booked they actually changed our schedule a little, so I think we're getting into Maui around 830 local time now. It's still going to be a nearly 24 hour excursion, though.

My fiance has to travel a lot for work, so he racks up a good amount of hotel points. Our plan, as of now, is to drive up to Newark late Sunday night and get a free room using his points, so we don't have to wake up as early on Monday.

It's a lot of craziness, but totally worth it. We only actually ended up spending ~$500 for both of us, roundtrip, because we had to purchase and transfer a few miles here and there. It worked out. :)

I just saw this thread, but if anyone else comes across it and needs help navigating the best options with miles, I recommend Cranky Concierge. I haven't used him for redeeming miles, but he did find me some great fares.

The second I started reading the top of the thread, I figured you were going to have to go through Newark. It's a pain, but it's pretty much the best option for getting to Hawaii from this part of the country.

However, for anyone else looking, keep in mind that Hawaiian announced earlier this year a non-stop out of JFK to Honolulu and United just announced a new DC to Honolulu non-stop daily route. So there are now far more options for East Coast ladies looking to get to Hawaii than when this thread started.

@LibertyBelle:  Seriously one of the greatest website ideas I've heard! Thanks for sharing. 

@kate02121:  Happy to share! He got us to Hawaii for about $100/per person less than what I found. That may not sound huge, but considering he got me out there two weeks earlier than what I could find (at $100 more per person) so that we could take advantage of a family member's free condo, we saved well over $1,000 with no housing costs. He also got us an extra day out there and on two different islands when we thought we would be stuck only doing Oahu for two weeks.

@September29:  Glad to hear it worked out! Booking a night up near Newark definitely sounds like the way to go.

 @LibertyBelle:  We had a friend who runs a similar business help us find our awards for our honeymoon--it was such a help having someone who could see all the various schedule permutations with partners, etc. Now fingers crossed that the airline stops changing their flight schedule around... I think FH has already had to redo it three times or so.