Introduction Planning United Global First Lounge Washington Dulles (IAD) Lufthansa Business and Senator Lounge Washington Dulles (IAD) ANA First Square Class Washington Dulles to Tokyo Narita ANA Suite and Business Class Lounges Tokyo Narita (NRT) ANA Business Class Tokyo Narita to Beijing IBIS Beijing Capital Airport Hotel Air China First Class Lounge Beijing (PEK) BGS…
Alaska Airlines has an interesting award program, largely because they’re not a part of any alliance and instead have one-off partnerships with a number of carriers. Two of those partners include Delta and American, so Alaska is often cited as a good program to credit to if you’re not particularly loyal to one carrier as…
With the offer of a 25% rebate on award redemptions for bookings made before November 30, 2013 for travel before March 31, 2014 and the current share miles promo where miles can essentially be bought for ~1.13 cents, I couldn’t turn down the chance to burn some miles and book an award trip to Asia….
REVISION: This post was done slightly in haste, so I’m not sure if other people will necessarily encounter the same problems as I did trying to book ANA space. I have a theory that I would like to test some more and I will follow up once I’ve gathered some more data. As far as…
One of the Ultimate Rewards transfer partners that never gets much attention is Amtrak. Perhaps understandably so, since most people don’t think of train travel as particularly aspirational, and trains aren’t planes or hotels, but I think that Amtrak should merit a closer look. When I was younger, I took Amtrak with my mom from…
As far as I know, there are no nonstop flights from the US to Bangkok, which is perhaps expected given the distance to Thailand from the US. Thai Airways used to fly nonstop from LAX to BKK, but that flight now has a stopover in Seoul. Luckily, there are numerous options to get to Bangkok…
If you’re looking for the most accurate Star Alliance award availability, you should be searching using the ANA website. It’s a little less user-friendly than the United website, but it’s 100% accurate (as far as I can tell), which means that I often do most of my searches on the ANA website, particularly when I’m…
I’m planning on going to Vietnam next year, and I had originally booked an award routing SFO-LHR-BKK-HAN on United Global First, Thai First, and then Thai Business. I was excited to fly LHR to BKK on Thai First because I thought the route was going to be served by an A380, and I had such…
Seoul is one of my favorite cities. The food is great (assuming you like Korean food…), the city is really accommodating of tourists (e.g. lots of museums are free, they’ve had promotions where they’ll give you free postcards and mail them for you), public transit is great, there’s interesting history as well as modern influences,…
Singapore Suites on the A380 is one of the most aspirational redemptions out there. If the load is light in the suites cabin, they’ll even make a double bed for you to sleep. Given how great this cabin is, Singapore has done a good job of “protecting” it, so it’s traditionally been very hard to…
