View from the Wing reports on excellent Vietnam Airlines award availability flagged by Instagram account @findflightsforme. I actually stumbled on a bunch of this a couple of months ago when plotting out a return from Asia, but at the time I passed on it because there unfortunately isn’t a “cheap” way to book it. That said, if you’re flush with Flying Blue miles or Virgin points or transferable points, this can no doubt be a great way to get as many as 4 passengers between San Francisco and Asia that’s pretty widely available this fall and next spring.
As View from the Wing notes, Vietnam Airlines operates this route with an A350 that looks pretty comfortable, but they only operate the route 4 times a week. That might make this screen shot look like it isn’t quite “wide open” availability, but given that they only fly the route 4 times a week you’ll see that almost every flight they operate is available in February.
At 140K points and $238 for a one-way business class flight to Asia, it’s certainly not a smoking deal, but up to 4 seats are available on many dates.
If you don’t already have Virgin points, you’d be better off transferring any of your transferrable currencies to Air France / KLM Flying Blue to book the same flight for 100,500 miles and about $242.
Gary points out that you could alternatively book via Korean Air SkyPass for only 77,500 miles (and about $250) each way, though I suspect that few readers have access to SkyPass miles since they ceased being a transferable currency partner (for US credit card programs) years ago (and the U.S. Bank SkyPass Visa cards aren’t particularly popular).
Obviously this availability could be helpful if you’re looking to go to Vietnam, but it could also be a good way to position to Asia as you can get from Vietnam to plenty of places in Southeast Asia quite cheaply.
Just keep in mind that Americans need a Visa to visit Vietnam. It isn’t particularly difficult (or expensive) to get, but you want to think about that before you are packing up your bags in Saipan to head to the airport and fly to Vietnam. As you might bet, I speak from experience on that — I had to call United and plead my case on making a change on a complicated multi-stop award while travel was in progress because I hadn’t thought to Google “Do Americans need a Visa for Vietnam?” until we were literally packing up to go to the airport for our flight. We had to change plans on that trip. A couple of years later, we did make it to Vietnam, but I mention this hoping to save someone else from having to make a last-minute trip save.
As noted at the top, I saw this space as I was searching for ways to get home from Japan with a family of four at the tail end of our summer trip (I was willing to position to Vietnam if necessary, though the aforementioned required Visa made it unideal). In the end, I found that Hawaiian Airlines had some excellent paid fares from Japan to the US in business class, so I ended up booking that with around 95K Membership Rewards points per passenger after the Business Platinum pay-with-points rebate. However, if you don’t find something like that, this could certainly be useful.
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