My wife and I both have ~50,000 points available on the Citi Thank You Premier cards. Not our first churning/travel hacking experience but probably our most complicated one so far. Need some guidance!
We are planning a two week trip to Europe in late August/early September where we will spend some time in the lakes/hills around Munich, then Innsbruck, then head down to Split, Croatia to travel locally and relax there.
Our optimal flight path is PDX->Munich, then Split->PDX (not including connections). These flights are coming in around $1,000 to $1,500 and some at $1,900. However, they are available on united and/or lufthansa and/or Air Canada for 60,000 points, and travel between North America and Europe is listed as 55,000 points on the star alliance roundtrip chart provided by Singapore Airlines.
We can transfer all of our points at a 1:1 value to Singapore Airlines and book travel on United/Canada/Lufthansa using these points. However, after a few phone calls today I learned that there aren't really any available seats for our flights, or even for more common flights like those to amsterdam or vienna.
Using points for these flights is by FAR the best deal and will save us big $$, but I'm not sure how We're going to pull it off. I'm a bit nervous because if I transfer the 50,000 points to the airline I'm kind of locked in, but I also want to have them in there so that if a flight is available I can jump on it.
Should we wait it out and keep calling? Transfer the points and trust that something will come available, or give up hope and use the points at a lower value to book through the Citi travel site?
Does anyone have experience with booking through the star alliance partners and waiting for seats to come available? Should we expect for it to happen or is it not likely at this point? How are we most likely to be successful with this?
