Tag: Business class

How I Got Flying Blue To Open Up Phantom Award Space

I’ve been looking at flights from Germany to the U.S. for our trip this winter. I already booked our flights to Germany on Singapore business class from New York but I figured I’d book the return later. Problem is that I can’t figure out our itinerary for the trip until I know which city we’re flying home from. That was incentive enough to have me look into finding flights, preferably award flights in business class.

My flight preference would be the non-stop flight on Lufthansa from Frankfurt to Orlando but since award seats tend not to open up until last minute, that won’t work with our plans. We won’t fly on United so options including their planes is a non-starter.

I started looking into flights on KLM or Air France. Both of them use the Flying Blue loyalty program and even though they have variable pricing on award tickets, they still have reasonable rates for many of their flights.

Much to my surprise, besides finding several options flying through either Paris or Amsterdam, a flight from Frankfurt-Detroit-Orlando was showing up. This flight was on two Delta planes and had decent times for arrival and departure and reasonable connection time.

I decided to try and book it.

Continue reading “How I Got Flying Blue To Open Up Phantom Award Space”

I Booked My Dad On The EVA Air Hello Kitty Plane And Didn’t Tell Him

I love helping book flights for my dad and his wife. Being retired, they get to take trips that I’m just not able to do. For one of these trips, he called me and said the two of them wanted to re-visit Southeast Asia. The trip was originally supposed to be to Thailand, with visits to Bangkok and Phuket but the trip soon expanded when they decided to visit Bali and seemingly the rest of Indonesia.

Planning the trip was difficult but I loved every minute of helping them use their miles to visit these exotic locations. I don’t want to do this for a living, so no award booking service here, but for my dad, I made an exception. By far, this was the best award trip I’ve ever planned. I got them from Seattle to Taipei to Bali on EVA Airways using ANA miles. That’s about as direct of a trip from the East Coast to Bali that you’ll find and all they needed to do was get to Seattle (they paid for a non-stop flight on Alaska Airlines, who runs a direct flight between the two cities).

The one thing that tickled me the most was that the flight from Taipei to Bali was on an EVA Airways Hello Kitty plane. I “forgot” to mention this to my dad and his wife 🙂

Continue reading “I Booked My Dad On The EVA Air Hello Kitty Plane And Didn’t Tell Him”

I Used Points From All Three Banks And We’re Flying To Germany On Singapore Airlines!

It’s not often that I get excited about a flight. Remember, I’m the person who proudly wrote how we’re over flying in business class “just because we can.” However when all of the puzzle pieces fell into place and allowed me to book a flight I had my eyes set on for forever, I had to pull the trigger.

Here’s the post I wrote about how I wanted to book a flight on Singapore Airlines from New York – JFK to Frankfurt. I had the flight on waitlist for saver space but I kept checking to see if anything opened up. Saver space never showed up but one day when I logged in, I saw that tickets were available to book at the Advantage level.

Under the new Singapore Airlines chart, a flight from the East Coast to Europe costs 72,000 KrisFlyer Miles at the Saver level and 85,000 miles at the Advantage level. If I was willing to pay 72,000 miles for a ticket, what’s an extra 13,000 miles a ticket, really?

Continue reading “I Used Points From All Three Banks And We’re Flying To Germany On Singapore Airlines!”

Earning An Easy 10,000 Points, Disney Grand Opening At MCO, SouthWest Is Matching Status Again, & More…

Happy Sunday to all of our travel friends, both near and far! Here are some articles we’ve read from other bloggers (and other sources) that we think you may like, as well, so we’re passing them along.

Continue reading “Earning An Easy 10,000 Points, Disney Grand Opening At MCO, SouthWest Is Matching Status Again, & More…”

I’m Not A Risk Taker But I Had To Give This One A Try

When it comes to earning and redeeming points and miles, my practice model might be described as low risk and moderate reward. I’m not going to go out and spend a bunch of money to try and earn miles with a plan that may or may not work. I’ll grind away earning the easy to acquire points and strategically use them where they’ll be the most valuable. In other words, I’m pretty boring.

That’s not to say we don’t fly to some amazing places in comfort, like during our trip to Australia and Japan. That’s not because I’m lucky, I just know the odds of getting the flights I want and make sure to have the miles to jump when they become available. I’ll set alerts and check daily (or more often) to see if anything changed, and patiently wait. Well, maybe not patiently.

So why then did I transfer a combination of 152,000 Amex Membership Rewards and Citi ThankYou points just for a chance to be able to book an award ticket?  Because when you even have the chance to knock off a bucket list flight on one of the most amazing planes out there, you just have to give it a shot. Continue reading “I’m Not A Risk Taker But I Had To Give This One A Try”