Getting your own air

[pipster37]

After getting your air credit from Oceania, how do you go about getting your own air and how do you use frequent miles to upgrade? Do you call the airline direct or are there certain websites? Also who do you speak to to upgrade with miles. I would assume if you had Delta miles you would have to speak to a Delta representative, I may be misinformed. Also I am trying to get booking on the April 28th mediterranean cruise. Right now they only have suites available. If I book that and wait for level 6 what are the chances of me getting that? Thank you

[Benita]

We booked our own air using points from American Airlines.As they do not fly into the places we needed (Miami to Athens, Istanbul to Miami), I could not do the bookings online and needed to call and speak to the agent. Through their alliance with other airlines, I was able to book two business class tickets, using a combination of Iberian, Turkish Air, and Swiss International Airlines, which happen to have excellent connections from Miami. The agent at American actually picked out the flights as there were so many airlines in the partnership. It cost 90,000 points each for the tickets which is pretty good value as it was almost $4000 per ticket had we purchased them.

I then called my travel agent who issued me a new invoice with the $800 per person from Oceania credited, as well as the airline taxes, saving about $1200 a person.

One word of advice - call the airlines early. They open up the bookings for frequent flyer tickets 329 days in advance. I had so many choices because that is the day I called in each direction. They put the flights over on hold and gave me a booking number to refer to when I called two weeks later for the flights home.

As far as who to speak to, call the number on the back of your frequent flyer card or go on the airlines website and click on Contact us and there will be phone numbers.

[nparmelee]

We booked our own air for this year's cruise, we have miles with a few airlines so we used kayak and itasoftware web pages to narrow down which airlines had the best flights then went to the airline web site to check which flights were upgradeable and booked directly with the airlines web site, requesting the miles upgrade at the same time. Some arilines are easier to work with than others, depending on how far out your flights are, it may be worth asking your TA to arrange it all for you or to call the airline and make sure that the flights you want to book have upgrades available still and pay the extra few bucks for the phone person to make sure it all goes the way you need it to.

[digby]

We always take the air credit. Then we buy an economy ticket usually on United or American and use FF miles to upgrade to Business Class. It has worked just fine for cruises in Europe, South America, and Asia.