Been wanting to write a post on positioning.
Lemme provide an example -
I needed to come back to the USA to renew my passport, to receive a delivery of furniture into my family's Miami apartment, and to take advantage of a ridiculous Jet Blue promotion (more below).
For those of you who read this thread, you know I don't dig on economy, or even premium economy, on long haul flights. I've done it, but I avoid it.
I live near Hong Kong, and flights out of Hong Kong back to the USA, in premium classes, well, they're pricey. Round trips usually start around 3500, though there are sales occasionally ex. HKG. There are also ways to get upgrades if you have top status with an airline, but when you have a fairly narrow window for travel, it can be impossible to wait for a cheap fare sale or to find upgrade space on a flight.
That's where positioning comes in. If one simply searches HKG - MIA, over a several week period, you'll find flights in the 3500-4000 RT USD range. HKG people have money to spend on premium class fares, and thus the costs are higher.
However, by changing the origin of a RT flight (or in some cases one way), for premium classes, we can see significant differences in the costs of RT premium class tickets.
After using HKG-MIA as a baseline, I begin to search for HKG to different USA locations, seeing if I can get a significant price drop for flying elsewhere. The best tool for this is Google Flights. Put in your intended origin and destination, and class of service, and then when it prices open the map. Set the price to the price quoted to your city of destination, and let the map populate with prices to all the other destinations on the map. You can further filter your results by travel time, airline, number of connections etc. You'll likely find that one or more cities might have a cheaper RT than the city you want to go to.
Is it enough cheaper that buying a second RT ticket (perhaps in economy since its shorter, on a regional or discount carrier perhaps) will make the all in cost substantially less than flying the main carrier all the way there and back? Will you need a hotel given the connection times (and allow for immigration clearance , however long that takes you in the country where the transit is taking place - US immigration, by way of example, is cleared in the first city a traveller enters in the USA (except for certain cities, like Toronto and Abu Dhabi and Nassau that have US clearance abroad).
Check the price, plus hotels and any additional costs, vs your baseline RT ticket? Is the savings worth it? Also consider the fact that if you book different alliances (and even in some cases within a single alliance), should you miss a connection, you may be at risk of paying a change fee and additional ticket cost. You'll want to leave enough time to make sure that you're fairly likely not to have this happen. Its never happened to me, but I often build in a nights stopover or a long layover.
So that's the first search against your baseline. The second search can be a search of a airport near your origin to the city of final destination. I know that many cities near HK have far cheaper business class flights out of them than HK does. Bangkok is famous in travel circles for this, especially for flights to Europe. Even a better value, Colombo Sri Lanka isn't as well known, but savvy Asian based premium class traveller use it as a origin point for flights to USA/Canada. Recent RT fares from CMB to Boston in business on Qatar have been between 1100 and 1300 RT, earning 40000 redeemable miles on AA, and 27,000 EQM (Status miles). And we're not talking flying United - these are long flights on an A350. To me, those flights have negative cost, as the miles alone are worth more than the cost of the ticket (arguments can be had, but I think they are - at least the way I'll use them). Depending on the time of year, other cities in Asia that are good to check fro discount biz fares are KUL, HKT, DAC, PEN, and CGK. (You can often find low priced tickets on Qatar (QR) and Etihad (EY) on these routes).
When one is looking at a CMB-BOS ticket at 1300 or even 1300 RT, its clear there is going to be an arb over a flight from HKG to the USA at 3500 USD> Even buying a positioning RT HKG-CMB (e.g., positioning yourself to CMB for the flight), and BOS-MIA, the savings will still be over 1000, easily, even with a CMB hotel and the mass of the journey will still be in biz class. I'm also an elite with AA, so I have a good chance to upgrade on such a BOS-MIA flight, had I booked it. Unfortunately, these CMB fares were not available for late August when I was looking so I had to find another way.
In addition, positioning this way can be built into an opportunity to look around a new city/country a little bit, depending on visa availability (Thailand is easy, as is CMB). Cheap hotels abound in both places. Its no hardship for me to spend time in Bangkok for a day or two before a long haul in general - and this also removes the possibility of a missed connection.
The next step of searching for the lowest premium long hauls is simultaneously searching for nearby cities on both the origin and destination. While google allows you to put in three cities on both origin and destination to find the best fare, or to use the map to search destination costs broadly from a single location, the engine on which google's search is based is far more effective, if a little harder to learn to use.
ITA Matrix, with a little learning, can allow you to search a month at a time for fares for all cities within a certain distance of your origin/destination. For example, I can search basically all carriers flying from cities within a certain distance of HKG (500,1000, or 2000 miles) to my destination or cities within those distances of it. I can do this over a month of fares, and I can do it with other parameters, such as within a certain alliance or airline, connections in certain cities (or excluding certain cities),etc. There are some bloggers who've written step by step guides to using ITA Matrix. A few runs through and even the tech challenged like me can get the hang of it. Regular searching will also begin to educate you on which routes are often available at a discount, on which airlines.
While I couldn't take advantage of the CMB - BOS fares because of my travel dates, I found a ticket using ITA Matrix that was still a good deal, allowed me to visit a new country, and earn a lot of miles.
I put in a 2000 radius around HKG and a 1000 mile radius around MIA for a week time span, and found QR tickets ex-Dhaka Bangladesh, for around 60 percent of the price of the HKG biz class tickets. THey'd be through Qatar, so I'd actually earn more mileage than flying biz from HKG (going the long way) so treating RDM as a rebate on ticket cost (which i think makes sense economically), these tickets had even more of a discount than the HKG-MIA tickets. And prices to Miami ex-Dhaka were around the same as heading to Boston, and cheaper than biz class for my dates than tickets from BKK, CMB and the other cities I mentioned.
The reason I had to get back was Jet Blue did a matching promotion where they would match a virgin american balance of a Jet Blue member if you took one RT flight before the end of August, up to 75K of match. I did not have any miles in my Virgin American account, but I have SPG miles. Even better, I have photo shop
I sent my photo shopped screen shot to Jet Blue, they approved me for the promotion, to get 75K miles. I needed a RT before the end of august, so during my stay in Miami, I booked a trip to Nassau Bahamas for an overnight. The JB miles are worth more than 1000 USD, and the Bahamas ticket cost 200. I'd not been to Nassau, so there was that too. Anyway, it made it worth it to get back and not wait for a lower fare ex-CMB.
Positioning can vary in cost - you have to run the numbers, look at the risks of missing a connection, hotel costs, and even the value of your convenience and comfort. Look at the different FF mileage earned from the various itineraries and then make an informed decision. Or suck it up and fly economy (we've all done it).
One thing that makes it cheaper for me to position is that I have miles and points in many different alliances. A ticket to Bangladesh from HKG direct was 1000 dollars on Dragonair (connections cheaper but long wait times). However, because I have British Airways points (and can transfer them from the Sapphire and if need be, AMEX cards), I can book that ticket for 10K points, a good redemption even for the indirect flights which cost more than 300. This allows me to preserve the savings of my flight, because I can position at a low cost.
Similarly, I have plenty of Starpoints at the moment, so I used them (cash and points) to book the Westin Dhaka in Gulshan. Similarly, I used a voucher from ten paid nights from Hotels.com to book my second night in Bangladesh almost for free. My out of pocket for positioning and a look around Bangladesh for a few days, staying at nice international hotels (westin in a big ass suite) was less than 200 USD (though Bangladesh visa fee is ridiculously 50 dollars).
I'm in the USA currently, on a flight to LA from MIA for a client. On my way back, after I hit Dhaka, I'll spend a day or two there again I think, as I have an interest in their textile markets for sales in China. After that, I'm considering positioning with a cheap flight an hour away to Kathmandu (also having a look at textiles there) and then using those same BA points to fly Dragonair back to HKG from Nepal.
Happy travels.
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It fit perfectly in the closet that comes with each seat. For you guitar players (Talyor GS mini with SKB hard case). The crew was actually surprised it fit so well in there.
