For those of you, like us, who have a frequent flyer program credit card and travel a lot - you might want to know what we just found. We had planned to use our frequent flyer miles to fly from Chicago to Sydney and from Auckland to Chicago in June and July. We figured that we would have to purchase the intermediate legs on our own. A friend of ours mentioned that they had used miles for some of the intermediate legs and maybe we could also. I checked with American and we were able to do our entire trip with miles. For 95,000 we are flying Chicago - Sydney - Cairns - Christchurch - Auckland - Chicago! I figure that saves us thousands each! So now we can stay at some nicer places.

wow cool -- is that 95,000 miles each person?

That's great, but remember, June and July are winter downunder. Expect it to be getting dark around 4:40 p.m. Don't expect to use miles between Christmas and New Year's. Those flights are always full.

And, no food for purchase with Qantas! Free wine in coach. You can keep those $5 bills at home.

Yes, that is 95,000 per person for all of thopse various legs. I figured it would be getting dark early at that time of year. Sort of like December here in Chicago. But maybe a bit warmer from what our Kiwi friends tell us. When I was originally checking on the various flight, I went to Orbitz since you can put in any number of legs to your trip and the trip we are doing would have cost us about $2500 each. Now we can spend that on the trip itself! We were also able to get pretty much the flights we wanted since it is low season. The only one that isn't appealing is the leg from Carins to Christchurch which ends up being a three hopper instead of only two. Oh well.

Try to get up to Cairns or Darwin to warm up a bit. Even Brissy will be a little warmer.

Definitely getting up to Cairns. We actually plan to stay in Port Douglas. Really looking forward to that part of the trip ! Thought about Darwin, but ran out of time. Maybe next trip!

Have you looked into using miles for Business? If you have more miles, it may be worth it.

AA's economy award from the US to Oz/NZ is 75,000 miles. The OP is then being made to use a second award for travel "within one country" presumably for the intra-Oz flights, 20,000 more. The Business class equivalents would be 125,000 plus 40,000 miles respectively, so 165K for the same itinerary in business.

Making the best of your routing and stopover rights in award travel is very important. 95K miles didn't come easily, so they should deliver the maximum bang per buck IMO.