Being an airplane and miles junkie, one of my goals is to fly every Airbus 380 first class product there is. So far I’ve flown Qantas and Lufthansa on the A380 in first class, and I have plans to fly Emirates and Air France Airbus 380 first class as well in the near future.

Lately I’ve been looking at how to efficiently redeem miles for Korean Air’s Airbus 380 first class, and I realize it can actually be a pretty darn good deal. Korean Air is transfer partners with Ultimate Rewards, which is the points currency of the Chase Sapphire Preferred and Chase Ink Bold credit cards. Points can be instantly transferred at a 1:1 ratio to Korean Air.

Korean Air actually has surprisingly reasonable first class award redemption rates. For example, first class from the US to South Korea costs only 160,000 Korean Air miles, which isn’t half bad.

While it’s not cheap, the real beauty of it is that Korean Air has phenomenal first class award space, even on the Airbus 380. In looking at award space on ExpertFlyer, almost every single date has 2-5 first class award seats on most of their to and from the US.

The thing to watch out for is that Korean Air has blackout dates, and if you want to fly during those dates you’re going to pay a 50% premium. The blackout dates are as follows:

With quite a few Star Alliance airlines more or less not releasing first class award space in advance, the relative value of an award like this increases. Good luck getting saver first class award space for 3-5 people to Asia on the same flight just about anytime of year through one of the “mainstream” programs. It ain’t happening.

So this really does tempt me, given that 160,000 miles is most definitely a reasonable first class redemption rate.

Anyone else tempted?

Through February 29, 2012, American Express Membership Rewards is offering a 25% transfer bonus to Air France/KLM’s Flying Blue frequent flyer program. The bonus is built into transfers, meaning the 25% bonus posts immediately and can be used an unlimited number of times.

Generally speaking Flying Blue isn’t a program I would transfer Membership Rewards points to (despite the high degree to which Membership Rewards points been devalued recently). But there are a few instances in which transfer could prove to be a great value.

Air France just about has the best transatlantic business class award space, especially over summer. While Star Alliance and OneWorld have virtually no transatlantic award space over the summer, many of Air France’s routes still have excellent space. For example, Washington to Paris has tons of business class award space, sometimes even nine seats per flight.

But if you’re redeeming for a roundtrip ticket on Air France you’re generally best off transferring your Membership Rewards points to Delta SkyMiles, given that they don’t impose fuel surcharges on award tickets, which can be roughly ~$500 roundtrip. The downside is that Delta doesn’t allow one-way awards, while Flying Blue does. So while you do pay fuel surcharges, you’re only paying 40,000 miles for a one-way business class ticket to Europe, which is a pretty great deal, especially over summer. Given that most airlines other than Delta allow one way awards nowadays, I’ve found myself transferring Membership Rewards points to Flying Blue for clients quite a bit, as they mix and match between alliances on a single trip.

Furthermore, Flying Blue runs promotional 50% off awards, whereby business class roundtrip to Europe is only 50,000 Flying Blue miles on select dates/routes. Through this promotion the price is lowered even further, to only 40,000 Membership Rewards points. That’s a spectacular deal for business class to Europe.

As you can see, this includes routes like Washington and Detroit to Europe on Air France, or New York, San Francisco, and Los Angeles to Europe on KLM.

This promotion won’t (and shouldn’t!) work for everyone, though it’s certainly worth keeping in mind.

While this is likely insignificant to anyone that doesn’t spend hours a day searching for award availability on continental.com, it’s worth noting that the website now displays award space for travel on Singapore and Air China, which it previously didn’t.

In case you hadn’t noticed they were missing, I don’t really blame you. Singapore hardly ever releases award space aside from intra-Asia flights, and it’s not like most people would want to redeem their miles on Air China, so…

Now if only they would display Swiss award space.

Frontier has a bit of a Cyber Monday deal, in that they’re offering 10% off any Frontier flight booked before 11:59PM pacific time tonight, for travel through March 7, 2012. Simply use promotion code CYBER10.

This is rather exciting news. Hawaiian Airlines will be launching daily service between Honolulu and New York JFK starting June 4, 2012. For years only Continental has flown between Newark and Honolulu, and award space has been virtually non-existent. So it’s great to see another airline add service between the two cities.

Hawaiian Airlines’ service will be operated by an Airbus 330 with the following schedule:

Hawaiian Airlines 50 Honolulu to New York departing at 3:05PM and arriving at 6:55AM (+1 day)
Hawaiian Airlines 51 New York to Honolulu departing at 10:00AM and arriving at 3:00PM

There are a couple of awesome things to note about the service.

First of all, they’re running a fare sale for most of June whereby round trip tickets are running $445 all-in. That’s an amazing deal between New York and Honolulu in summer.

But here’s the really good news. Award availability on the route is excellent thus far. Admittedly Hawaiian’s first class product is closer to domestic first class than international business class (though they have 42 inches of pitch, which is fairly good), the convenience of a nonstop flight is unbeatable.

I see award space for almost every day, and keep in mind that they’re partners with American, so you should be able to book the space roundtrip for 35,000 miles in coach or 75,000 miles in first class.

You can look up the award space on Hawaiian’s website by signing up for a Hawaiian Miles account and then using their online search tool. If you see award space at their “saver” level (which is 20,000 miles one-way for coach or 40,000 miles one-way for first class), you should be able to book this via American as well.

Enjoy!

(Tip of the hat to reader Mike)

Back in July I wrote about Air Berlin reaching a tentative agreement to join the OneWorld alliance, which is great news for OneWorld flyers. While they are a low cost airline (making them less attractive for premium cabin redemptions) this opens up a lot of new options, especially for travel between the US and Germany.

Well, as of October 10 you could start earning and redeeming American AAdvantage miles for travel on Air Berlin, despite them not formally having joined OneWorld yet.

At the time the only way to search Air Berlin award space was directly through their website, though just yesterday I noticed that Air Berlin award space can also be searched via British Airways’ online search tool.

As a refresher, Air Berlin’s year-round US destinations are Fort Myers (to Dusseldorf), Miami (to Dusseldorf and Berlin), and New York (to Dusseldorf and Berlin), while they offer seasonal service from Los Angeles (to Dusseldorf) and San Francisco (to Dusseldorf).

From searching award space it appears as if availability for coach is good, while availability for business class is okay, with them sometimes (though not always) releasing two to four business class award seats per flight.

For a refresher about how to find award availability using the British Airways website, see my TravelSort article on the topic.