The story

Let’s go back in time to 2017, when I was in the process of booking business-class award flights for my family of four from Houston to Australia for a trip celebrating my husband’s 40th birthday the next year. Australia was his dream trip for decades, and we were finally going to make it happen.

I was able to book the four of us on into saver Polaris business class on United from IAH to LAX, and then LAX to SYD by using the United “Plan B” waitlist trick. (This still may be my greatest award-booking feat to date. I was really proud of that one! You can google it if you’re curious, but I’m not sure it exists anymore.)

I was ecstatic that we had managed to get four business-class seats from the US to Australia at the saver price at all, because it’s a notoriously difficult route to find that kind of award space on, and especially for four people on the same flight. And we didn’t mind that we had to connect in Los Angeles. I mean, what else were we going to do? Houston didn’t have a nonstop flight to Australia.

Until it suddenly did.

I read a news release a couple of months after we had booked our flights about the new route United was going to be launching between Houston and Sydney and something clicked in my brain.

None of those seats on any of those nonstop flights had been booked yet. They couldn’t have been—because the flight didn’t even exist yet. So theoretically, maybe, they were . . . all available? Or some were available?

So I figured what the heck, let’s try this. And I called United to ask if there was any possibility that our business-class award tickets from IAH-LAX-SYD could be changed to the new IAH-SYD nonstop route. I pointed out that this route didn’t exist when we originally booked our flight, so we thought it was worth asking if they’d let us switch without paying a fee. And we got lucky. The heavens aligned. Unicorns flew through the sky. A friendly phone agent changed our reservation from the connecting flight to the nonstop flight and even waived the phone/change fee. And my family of four flew nonstop from our home city to Sydney in business class for the lowest possible amount of points we could have possibly gotten away with.

I felt then (and still feel now, years later!) that this was basically the Holy Grail of award redemptions: nonstop from your home airport to Sydney, Australia, in Polaris business class for the lowest number of miles and taxes possible in any program that’s actually bookable. I literally could not have done better, and I’ll be chasing that high for years.

The takeaway

The odds of this specific type of situation happening with any given connecting flight you already have booked might be low, but the general concept you can take away from this example still holds: When a new airline route is announced, the award seats on those new flights are unclaimed and just waiting for you to book. For example, a new route was announced earlier this year between Denver and Istanbul on Turkish Airlines, and a friend of mine was able to take advantage of this new route by snagging business-class seats that would probably have been hard to come by otherwise. It gives you a little bit of a leg up on finding available award seats when not everyone else realizes that there’s even a flight to look for them on yet! You’re more likely to have your pick of travel dates and be able to find the award seats you’re looking for than you would be with a regular flight that’s existed for years and people may have already set up award-search alerts for, or just know exists in general.

Another extra takeaway

If you’ve ever been tempted to book an ANA RTW business-class award ticket (the amazing and impressive Point Sisters are experts at booking these and offer a booking service!), a new route beginning on any Star Alliance airline could become a useful puzzle piece that helps your whole trip come together. So pay attention to new route announcements in general, and be sure to pay special attention to any new routes announced by Star Alliance carriers.