First time writing a DDF TR, but as I've gotten so much from reading others, I wanted to add my own. We took this trip in February of 2017 (so, this TR is a tad late...)
Planning:
Back in early 2016 when AA announced their mileage devaluation, SO and I were sitting on 100K AA miles (60k of which was earned from a
New Year's trip to London via Dan!) that I wanted to burn before award prices got knocked up further.
We had just planned two weeks in Japan and Hong Kong for September 2016 and I wanted to knock off another Asian destination from my bucket list, but we would only have about a week of PTO to use by that time. I settled on Bali, having heard really amazing things from friends.
In order to book for a time when we would actually have PTO to spare, I looked as far in advance as possible. I booked two tickets on CX J JFK-HKG-DPS in early March for February 2017 as a placeholder and called a few weeks after the deval to change the date to the end of February.
The next big problem was getting home. I really wanted to fly SQ and could pool TYP and some MR to fly the two of us in J DPS-SIN-JFK, the issue was finding award space. I kept my eye on the trends for SIN-FRA-JFK, but it quickly became clear that I wasn't going to book seats in advance on that route and I knew I would not be able to leave the return flight to the last minute and also enjoy my vacation (I don't know how you all do that). Based on the recommendation from from DDFers, I checked other routes and found 2 J seats DPS-SIN-ICN-SFO on the date I wanted. Apparently no one wanted to fly that route...
I snagged a hidden city ticket from SFO to JFK in J on AA and we were all set for flights.
Redemption Breakdown:
CX 889 Business x2: 100k AA Miles (after 10k CC discount)
SQ 32* Business x2: 136k SQ Miles and $600 in YQ
AA OW Biz SFO-JFK-(XXX) x2
Overall this was more than I wanted to spend in YQ, but it was also thrown together a bit haphazardly.
A few months after booking I awoke to the news that SQ was changing their SIN-ICN-SFO flights to a direct flight and sure enough, we were automatically rebooked on the direct flight SIN-SFO, which ended up giving us a lot more of a layover in SFO than we had initially planned.
Then it was just a matter of reading, preparing, and finding where we wanted to stay...
