a great, no-longer-exclusive points deal on flights to NZ/Australia

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We're still waiting on Tim's green card (fingers crossed for sometime in Autumn of this year...), but until that happens there's still a lot of back-and-forth happening. Prices to Australia are still sky-high (north of $10,000 for Business) and award seats are still incredibly scarce.

I usually search on United.com using Tim's account because he has 1k status, and I noticed this:


A bunch of very-discounted fares from SFO and LAX to Sydney and Auckland. Given that the Saver level for Polaris is now 200,000 points each way, this was a steal. I had a few Chase points to transfer in, but I needed to buy points to top off my account. 

So, for $2031 and 168,000 miles, I'm going round trip to Sydney in Polaris and spending the depths of winter enjoying Sydney's Vivid festival and Hobart's Dark Mofo.

While making notes to myself for this post, I saw that this deal is no longer exclusive to 1k members, so if you're looking to get out of American summer and hit up Australian winter, this could be a good way to do it. 

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