[caligemini]

Hello everyone,

I have enough miles to fly myself & dh to and from Moscow for our second trip (court date, bring home son).

The problem is that frequent flyer tickets are non-changeable once ticketed. So, I am wondering what the odds are that my return date from Moscow will change.

Have any of your used FF miles to book your second trip?
If not, did your return date from second trip change from what was originally communicated to you?

[GCS]

we did use miles for trip 2. We were lucky that we didnt have any changes, we were pretty nervous about it, but it was such a huge savings we took the chance!

[mrbkr]

Hello Christina,

I travel the world for a living. I've been doing that for over 30 years. I have over 1,000,000 FF miles. I must tell you that it was almost impossible to redeem my FF miles for our second trip for several reasons. I was unable to get a round trip flight into St. Petersburg on my FF miles for the time frame that we are traveling. We just didn't have enough advanced notice. It was way too much of a pain in the a_ _ to deal with. Good luck to you. I hope you fair better than we did.

We did manage to purchase some very reasonable flights into St. Petes returning from Moscow through Yahoo. The round trip air fare for both my wife and I was $2,071.00 total and the one way fare for our daughter (she's 14) was $729.00.

Now as far as your return dates are concerned I would say that depends strongly on weather the judge waves your 10 day waiting period or not. If so I'm sure you'll want to leave as soon as you can and get out of there early. You might want to check with your agency and ask them what the chances are of the judge waiving the 10 day wait. If their worth their salt they should have a pretty good idea what your chances are.

[Katie63011]

I was not able to use my FF for our second trip but our dates did not change. Our region never waived the 10 days and we knew that going into it.


If we can use FF this adoption, we will and take our chances. It would be less money to be delayed a day or two in Moscow than two plane tickets. That is the way I look at it.

[BD2884]

We were able to use our mileage on our second trip. I preferred to use it on the first trip, but it happened so fast that I couldnt get seats. I am keeping my fingers crossed that the waiting period will be waived but I believe that we can change it in case that doesnt happen. Does your region generally waive the waiting period? That might be a good indicator of whether or not you should use mileage.

Good luck!
Bari

[Ktates]

We used Frequent flier miles for both trips - we flew in December so that helped but used them with 4 days notice...actually 3 (into St. Pete and trip 2 was into st. Pete and out of Moscow). As long as we didn't change the routing we could change the dates no problem - which we did have to do for trip 2. We only got charged a fee on my ticket since I had paid for that to begin with. DH's was on FF miles and we didn't have to pay any fees for that. We were on American/BA if that helps..

[waxhawfamily]

We used miles to travel on trip 1, but couldn't get a flight out on FF for trip 2. With ours, we could change the travel dates for a fee - we confirmed this before booking our trip 1 FF tickets.

Trip 1 didn't change, but on trip 2, we were actually able to come home 1 day early. We had purchased tickets using Delta's adoption rates, so there was no change fee. Even if there had been a fee, we would have come out even by saving a hotel night and extra meals.

If your FF program will not allow changes, even for a fee, you will be taking a risk. Our region fairly consistently, waives the 10 days. We would have used the points if we could, knowing that worst case, we would forfiet the return flight and have to buy tickets to travel home.

Oh, one more thing; we were using USAir, and they don't have a presence in Russia (no office to walk in to like Delta, and others). If we did need to change, we would have had to make changes over the phone to secure seats on another flight. Then we would have to overnight our original return tickets to someone back home, have then drive to the airport to turn them in, pay the change fee, and get our new tickets, then overnight them back to us. USAir doesn't allow you to travel out of the USA on e-tickets using FF. You have to have a paper ticket, and they won't reissue new paper tickets without the originals back. This would have been a huge hassle, and just this process alone could extend an already long trip. There could also be a problem with return trip availability.

Our Delta adoption rate tickets ran us around 5k for two adult round trip, and one child one-way (all changeable).

[mikiment]

We used them on both trips through Delta and had no problems at all. We even changed dates for 2nd trip return due to 10 day being unexpectedly waived in our region, but only incurred a small change fee. Best of luck!

[erickk]

How many FF miles do you need for a trip to Moscow? We are going to Novosibirsk and will fly Delta? Delta does not fly into Novo so we will need to fly Aeroflot once we get to Moscow. Thanks. Also if anyone recommends somewhere to book flights it would be great if you would PM me. Thanks.
Karen

[nungesser]

From what I've observed, using FF to buy tickets is very dicey becuase the odds of your travel dates changing, especially your departure from Moscow, are about as good as it snowing in Moscow in January. IMHO, I'd use the FF to upgrade standard (but upgradeable) tickets to business or first class if you can swing it.

[cici32]

I didn't use FF miles but if I remember correctly you are in the Chelyabinsk region. We just returned home from completing our adoption from that region and I can tell you that the judge never waives the 10-days. We were also able to get the passport done the day after we picked Andrei up, which was a Tuesday and flew to Moscow Tuesday night. We had planned on spending the entire week in Chelyabinsk because we were told we would apply for his passport on Tuesday and pick it up on Thursday. So obviously we moved up everything else. We orginally planned on coming home on the 28th and was able to come home 9/23. We did have some issues with hotels in Moscow. There was a convention going on and rooms were hard to come by, so we moved around each night. Thankfully, we were only in Moscow 3 nights before flying home.

I know this has nothing to do with FF miles but I wanted to post our experience, so maybe you could figure out some type of time line and run it by your agency to see if it would work for your family.

[wifeoverne]

We did not use FF miles, but did have horrible experience with changing dates. We bought tickets through a travel agency for the dates we were to travel. Just before we left for our court trip, Nina Hilt was murdered. The judge for Nina Hilt's adoption was the same judge we were to go before. Since we are adopting independently we had to meet with the judge to present our papers. Needless to say the judge was not very happy with Americans and she did not accept our papers, so we had to come home 3 weeks early. When we called Delta they said all flights were sold out until Aug 12. This was on July 24; we went to the Delta office the next day and they told us the seats for the internet fare were sold out, but we could buy new tickets for $2300 each. We were resigned to pay this, until my husband asked if Delta had military rates, and we were able to buy tickets for $1300 each. Now we have return tickets from Moscow (from the first set of tickets) that are only good until Oct. 15 and tickets to Moscow that are changeable until January 25. Never would I have thought that this would happen, our girls should have been home a month now and here we are waiting for another court date and another trip. Just beware that anything can happen, every flight we have been on to and from Moscow (three trips) has been full.

[lippylulu]

The odds are high that you second trip dates will change so you always want chanegable tickets. We transfered American express Reward points to Delta's freqent flier program. We were able to change our FF tickets indefinitely because we paid double miles (100,000 per ticket instead of 50,000). We had to change dates 4 times so it was worth it. Also, fpor the return flight you can purchase an adoption fare which can be changed any number of times.