Time Travel for New Year’s: 5 Flights That Turn Back Time And Let You Celebrate Twice

by Gary Leff

The international date line can confuse travelers. When you’re heading in one direction you lose a day, headed back the other you can gain a day.

When flying from Los Angeles to Sydney, you depart late at night and arrive in Australia in the morning two days later even though the flight is only 13 hours. And then when returning the States from Australia you land earlier in the day the same day than when you departed.

The international date line is a great trick that makes it possible to have two New Years Eve celebrations the same year, and five flights allow you to do this – spending New Years Eve in one city, flying to another city and doing New Years Eve again – because you don’t fly out until January 1, and arrive back on December 31. Time travel!


Fireworks Over Town Lake in Austin


Fireworks Over Town Lake in Austin

United is even promoting their morning Guam to Honolulu flight as ideal for this:

There are actually (5) flights that will allow you to celebrate the New Year twice, as first noted by AirlineGeeks.

  • Guam – Honolulu, 7:35am – 6:50pm-1, United 200
  • Hong Kong – Los Angeles, 12:15 a.m. – 8:55pm-1, Cathay Pacific CX800
  • Hong Kong – San Francisco, 12:55 a.m. – 9:00pm-1, Cathay Pacific CX872
  • Tokyo Haneda – Los Angeles, 12:50 a.m. – 5:50pm-1, ANA 106
  • Hong Kong – Vancouver, 1:00am – 8:30pm-1, Cathay Pacific 888

Clearly the United flight is the best one, allowing you to celebrate New Years Eve in Guam and then head to the airport (super early) on New Years Day, catch the flight to Honolulu and then land early enough to go out for another New Years Eve celebration on December 31st. Just get some good sleep on this scheduled 7 hour 15 minute flight. There’s even still plenty of seats available, even in business class.

“Time travel” can be confusing, even for airline agents. Years ago Ben Schlappig of One Mile at a Time and I did a joint session teaching award booking at a frequent traveler conference. We each gave each other ‘challenges’ to research award space and then call the airline to make a booking live. Neither of us knew what the other would come up with.

  • Ben (aka Lucky) made me use Delta SkyMiles to book business class to India and back on specific dates using partner airlines. I found availability on Aeroflot and Saudia. When I called Delta on speaker phone in front of an audience of hundreds the SkyMiles agent said exactly what I’d told the audience to expect, “Air France is our only partner in SkyTeam.” I had to put the phone on mute because of the roars of laughter.

  • I challenged Ben to book a US Airways business class award to South Asia but priced as a less expensive North Asia award, and return to the U.S. arriving back the day before his first flight to Asia departed.

When Ben called US Airways he had no problem with the pricing. He just repeated the mantra that everywhere he was flying was in North Asia. He booked a flight from the West Coast to Tokyo “in North Asia” and wanted to connect to Bangkok “in North Asia.” US Airways agents manually applied pricing then, and in Ben’s words only understood three regions of the world (“Europe, America, and The China”).

But he got tripped up on “time travel.” The agent simply could not understand, and would not book, a connecting flight after his Tokyo – Los Angeles leg that landed the day before it left. Time travel across the international date line can be hard! But it can also be used to your benefit for two New Years celebrations!

About Gary Leff

Gary Leff is one of the foremost experts in the field of miles, points, and frequent business travel - a topic he has covered since 2002. Co-founder of frequent flyer community InsideFlyer.com, emcee of the Freddie Awards, and named one of the "World's Top Travel Experts" by Conde' Nast Traveler (2010-Present) Gary has been a guest on most major news media, profiled in several top print publications, and published broadly on the topic of consumer loyalty. More About Gary »

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  1. Fun fact: I flew HNL to GUM using the “island hopper” on the last day before Continental Airlines (now United) switched from OneWorld to Star Alliance.

  2. I always thought NZ or HA making AKL-HNL work for two NYE celebrations would be really cool. The first big NYe and the last one…

  3. @MaxPower very cool point. Looking at their schedules the evening of the 31st, they’d only need to push their existing flights by about 3-4 hours to make this happen. Doesn’t seem like a huge operational challenge for once a year given the amount of publicity it would draw.

  4. Anyone who has waited for those bloody flights to leave SYD or AKL just wants the day to be over! Just sort of kidding. We did SYD to HNL last week. Agree that it should be an easy sell! We’d do it.

  5. The GUM to HNL flight is good if you are going to party but the other ones are problematic. Where do you get your drinks to party while already boarded or boarding an airplane or going through security?

  6. I remember seeing a competition prize in the 1990s being a NYE party in London, helicopter ride to Heathrow just after midnight, onto Concorde to JFK, and a helicopter ride to a party in NYC, arriving just before midnight to celebrate again.

  7. The “coming back” part is cool.
    We have a AKL-MIA flight booked for February. It leaves AKL at 13:20. After a 4 hr layover in DFW we arrive MIA at 16:39 the same day.

  9. I learned this on my first business trip to Japan, company travel agent asked name if I wanted the available free airfare 3 day layover in HNL coming back from NRT. It was a no brained, and then I learned I wouldn’t even need a vacation day as I left NRT at 7pm Friday and landed at 7 am Friday in HNL.

  11. @SMR. You are correct. I should have written,

    Fun fact: I flew HNL to GUM using the “island hopper” on the last day before Continental Airlines (now United) switched from SkyTeam to Star Alliance. Thanks to Northwest Airlines from Detroit, I had millions of miles, now Delta Airline, to use before the alliance update in October 2009.

  12. I’ve celebrated my birthday twice on the GUM-HNL flight (yes, I did pick that deliberately). Thing is, at least at that time, UAL was using old 777-200s with outdated seats so sleep was always a dicey proposition. And it wasn’t like I got up at 4am either. Nope. I flew ROR-GUM first so I was connecting and had been up since 7 am the previous day. And even being that tired sleep was hard in economy.

  13. We did part of the “island hopper/mail run” earlier this year MNL-GUM-HNL.

    Some years you can also do it on Fiji Air from NAN-HNL on FJ 820/853 (853 has a technical stop for fuel in APW (Samoa) with flight times btwn 6.5hrs and 8± hours.

    Fun fact Fiji/NZ are the furthest number of “time zones” between US and another country. But Its only 1 hr real difference to your body clock (Jet lag) between Fiji-HNL and only 4 hrs Fiji-West Coast. It’s similar to dealing with jetlag on Flight LAX-NYC or NYC-LHR.

    I think the worst jet lag I remember dealing with was the 12/13 hours difference between NYC-MNL before lie-flat seats and they still allowed smoking.

  14. iNew Years Eve 1999. Despite the Y2K fears & furor, I was booked on a KAL flight from Seoul to Honolulu departing about 8pm local time with a scheduled arrival at 7am Honolulu time (still 12/31/99 because of the international data line.
    Departure gate was so deserted that I checked my boarding pass … one other passenger in business class; only a handful of people in economy. I swear that there were more crew than passengers on that 747!

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