suggested strategy, using United frequent flyer miles

QUESTION ?????? You book ff as early as you can - roughly 11 months out. Use their chart for available. Works pretty well. If you don't initially find what you want, check back in a couple of days, but don't wait too long.

I'm doing exactly the same thing right now for Oct 2016 using ff miles. tried talking to them yesterday and couldn't get what I wanted, called back got a different person, (this works sometimes), got put on hold and then cut off. Realized I shouldn't be calling on a weekend, so I'll be on the phone with them tomorrow (Monday) in the morning. If that doesn't work I call sometimes twice a day and every day until I get what I want. The one thing I would warn you about is letting them pick the flights, because they often don't give me enough time to change planes for what I'm comfortable with. What they consider a legal plane change time is too short for me.
During the week I sometimes call pretty late at night when they don't seem to be as busy. It helps to know exactly what airport you want to fly into and out of. We usually do multi city.

Good luck and have a great trip
Mimi

First, you should pick some places you want to visit and determine where you plan to fly out of and into. Then, try to book the trip directly on the United website - I am fairly sure it will cost you extra to book with a live agent (I would use them as a last resort if you can't make an itinerary work, if it's a really complicated multi-city itinerary, or if you're about to pull your hair out because you've tried everything else). You need to see how many miles each of your potential trips will cost and whether there are seats available, so make sure you're logged in using your Mileage Plus account (booking with miles is pretty straightforward on the website). If you want to use the least amount of miles, you should be prepared to be very flexible in terms of dates/times of travel (and even airports used).

Maybe this article will help:
http://thepointsguy.com/2015/04/how-to-book-awards-with-united-mileageplus-miles/?li_source=LI&li_medium=related-articles

As late as last year, had pretty good success going "deep" into the FF options on their graph where it seemed that using their partners(Air Canada, Brussels, Swiss) resulted in needing significantly fewer miles than using a strict UA intinerary. Last year, found 2 80,000 ff tickets for wife and GS RDU-EWR-BRU-PMO at Thanksgiving(!) return FCO-MUC-EWR-RDU the Sunday after Thanksgiving using Brussels Air connecting in BRU to Palermo, and Lufthansa FCO-MUC connecting to UA in Munich. In 2013, wife's itinerary used Air Canada to/frm the EU for less than 100,000 ff points.
Going forward, I think this is going to be more difficult given the massive changes they are making in the FF programs-in fact, I've gone from an avid point collector to using TA, Emirates, or Icelandic because all the US legacy carriers have so massively devalued their programs that it doesn't seem to work for me anymore. My bottom line advise is to use what you have as fast as you can before they devalue them further.

I'm a little surprised that every answer so far has made it sound so complicated. In late September, I booked one free ticket, on line, from SFO to Vienna in mid-April, returning CDG to SFO in early May. It cost 90,000 ff points, and it was the itinerary I would have chosen had I been using $$. Unfortunately, we didn't have enough points for the 2nd ticket, so had to use $$. It appears that the same will apply to you. Even though your two accounts together have enough for two tickets, the one thing that is really hard to do is to combine points. Unless you're very close to the number needed, they charge so much to do so that it isn't worthwhile. Ditto for buying the extra needed points.
Before calling, I suggest that you log in, then go to "use miles." Find the itinerary you prefer. Or, find an itinerary first, then see if you can get it for points. I'd get the free ticket (actually, there's a small charge) first, then go over to the regular screen to buy the second. I added the economy plus option as I paid the charges for each ticket.
I don't see any reason to pay the fee for using one of the agents unless you run into a stone wall.

We have trouble getting FF seats out of Santa Barbara half the time we try. We always call on the first date seats become available, and then daily to get what we want. We finally gave up this time trying to fly out of SB and are flying out of LA in June for our RS tour. I find that if you call and don't get what you want, call back and get another person. That has worked for us. Also, when they say seats are not available, I always ask for any other date they show around that time. Sometimes that works well and gives us an extra few days on one end or the other. One thing that I find annoying is being told that nothing is available but business or first class. Also find it irritating when I ask about using a partner airline and being told " you didn't ask me for that" only to then get the seats I needed!

Be careful of changes to your FF reservations. We have had frequent changes to our flights initiated by the airline. Make sure you look at the changes when you are notified. Once I had a quick layover in Boston to LHR. I was notified of a change and found that my initial arrival at 5 PM Boston was on time but was rescheduled from my 10 PM flight to 6 AM the next day to LHR. That took a bit of time and trouble to get fixed.

Start early and be persistent.

A couple of things to consider. To book a flight with United you can only see fares 330 days in advance but with some of their partner airlines you can book about 360 days in advance so get a head start. Also you are almost equidistant between SFO and LAX so that greatly increases your chances of finding some good connections for flights to Europe.

I just looked online at united.com, and I saw availability for 2 seats from SBP to various cities in Europe nearly every day next September and October, just 30K each way per person. Maybe not great connections, but it's there for the taking. For UA flights to Europe, start by looking at FRA as your destination (Lufthansa's hub, United's major codeshare partner to Europe). Seats look wide open, so you have LOTS of options - with the short leg from your home town to the gateway, you may have fewer options than if you just bite the bullet and look for flights out of SFO or LAX. You appear to have multiple options right now. If it were me, I'd jump on it. (then again, I just booked first class seats to Bangkok and back using my FF miles, so need to give it a rest for a while!)

David's post, above, reminded me of one other thing. I think that when I had checked earlier, the points cost for the FF ticket was 30,000 points each way. Since I was close to having 120,000, I thought I'd wait until I had enough for two tickets. When I had the points, the price had gone up. Lesson learned, carpe diem!

I agree with JerryG. But because you start with a connection, you won't be as happy to fly with a European connection - but it can save time if your destination is a secondary city. And using a partner airline will save miles. I have often found Lufthansa business class flights with one connection when there are zero United flights. I have also found Lufthansa equipment over the Atlantic (I'm not talking about code-share, I mean a branded Lufthansa plane) more comfortable and slightly better food than United.

I'll add one piece of advice that has helped me in the past. I previously used FF miles on an open jaw into Istanbul and out of London. At first it looked hopeless but after exhausting all online options and calling several different times I finally got an operator who checked flight by flight and found that the problem was finding an FF seat on the return leg going from Chicago to Austin, everything else was a go. She put in a request to give me a seat on that last leg and it went through and I got my flights. Airlines have good reason to do this sort of thing as it was taking a lot of miles off their system for making this one exception.

Lesson learned, sometimes it is only one of the legs that is preventing you from booking your flights and if it is a short or domestic one you might get them to make an exception. It's one of those things you can do online.

DJ

Oh - the post above reminds me...
Here are some of the most important things to know and remember when using FF miles...

1. Remember that the agent you call is probably clueless or unmotivated to do anything but the absolute minimum they have to. So...

2. YOU need to be the expert in the transaction. Do NOT expect the call center agent to know much about the program they are working for, or to try very hard to help you accomplish your goals. There are a thousand little rules and exceptions. They probably don't know (or care about) any of them. They are trained to plug in your request (at the simplest level) into a computer, then the computer (programmed by the airline that has no incentive to enable you to actually use your miles as you want) will make a minimal effort. Simple searches often result in "sorry, no availability" or "sure, seats are available...if you pay triple points and spend a night in Cleveland". Of course there are exceptions, and you may get lucky and find a motivated, knowledgeable, helpful agent - but don't count on it. So what do you do? Two things...

3. Do Your Homework, find out what's really available (it's not a secret, but it's often not what they show you - see below), gather all the details, then spoon-feed the details to the agent - that makes it easy for them (most are lazy and are happy to have you do the work). Do you REALLY know what airlines you can redeem your miles on? Most people don't. You got United miles? They're great - especially if you use them on some other airline. You can redeem United miles on many of their partners flights. The trouble is, United deliberately hides the availability of many of those partner flights (it's in their business interest to get you to not redeem at all, or at worst redeem on their own flights). Some airlines make it harder (and more expensive) to redeem on partners, but if you never consider doing that you are greatly limiting yourself. As an example, I was looking for flights to Thailand next fall. The FF program where I have a huge sack of miles doesn't fly to Thailand - and if they did, I'd rather go on a partner. They do not show most of their partner flights on their web search engine - for those you have to call. But if I call and just ask the agent for 2 seats to Bangkok and back, they will say "no availability" because their idiot computer program is set up that way. I knew to search for partner award availability using OTHER websites, I found it and got every detail, then called my airline, spoon-fed the agent every details, and it all went perfectly. I'm flying in a beautiful first-class suite on one of the world's best airlines, for pocket change and a modest amount of miles - and probably less miles than a lot of people spend on uncomfortable, cramped coach seats on US airlines to Europe. The point here is not to brag, but it's to reinforce that YOU need to be the more informed party in the transaction, and you can get amazing flights for your miles.

4. "HUCA" (Hang Up And Call Again). Don't like what the agent is telling you? Assuming you have done your homework and you think you should be getting better results...thank the agent, end the call, hang up then call again. The next agent may be more inclined to help.

5. Finally, the most basic tip of all: search for your flights segment-by-segment. Trying to go from Oshkosh to Pisa? Don't search on that! Search for the long over-ocean flight first, separately (maybe Detroit-Amsterdam, depends on what airline) then the connecting segments. Don't let the lack of a short flight at one end (short domestic legs often have limited seats) wreck an otherwise workable itinerary. String together your route (know the airlines rules for how many legs you can have) and then spoon-feed that to the agent. This not only gives you more options and a better chance, it also allows you to control things like layovers.

Hope that helps - good luck.

there's a site called Flyertalk that lives for this kind of stuff. They aren't ultra-helpful to newbies but if you watch the site and read the posts you might pick up some tips. There are also folks you can pay a nominal amount who will help with FF bookings, you can find them through the site thepointsguy.

Be open to many European airports and just look at stuff every day. My wife and I sat at adjoining computers and ran through many permutations until we found one that worked, we paid for a 7-day hold. Next day we were at it again and found a better itinerary so she booked her miles and I booked mine.

You will probably have the best luck if you don't try to book a trip to/from SLO, assume you'll have to pay to get to SFO or LAX and work the trip from there. I'm not sure you have enough miles for Europe in the 69K account.