Part 1
Intro and Background
Welcome to my trip report. It’s the story of my trip, with my best mate ‘M’ (mate, as in friend!) to the US. I’ll try and make it as much about the travel/flying experience as possible, though I will include some details and photos of the cities visited, as well as favourite dining and drinking experiences. Forgive the verbose nature of the TR in places, its written as a personal account as much as an FT Trip Report! Please comment and ask any questions – I’d be delighted to answer!
A little about me- I’m 27, married, from a small town in northern Wales, and am a regular flyer within Europe, but I’d never flown long-haul prior to this trip. I’m a huge football (that’s soccer!) fan, and following the Welsh national team has led me to cities and nations that I would otherwise probably never visit – Podgorica anyone??
I also love flying, which is kinda strange I guess, since most of my flights are on low-cost carriers – mostly Easyjet and Ryanair; even to holiday destinations such as the Canaries etc, these two appear to be getting ever more dominant. Since my first flight when I was 8 years old, airports have fascinated me – so many people going to so many destinations all for different reasons. At one time I actually thought it would be cool to be part of all that and work in an airport, but it was never a career path I considered too seriously as I got older.
But I digress!! The trip was a long time in the making. M and I had both taken out BMI credit cards a year or two ago, taking advantage of the bonus sign-up offers, with the intention of getting some reasonable flights to follow our football team. However, we soon realised that due to taxes etc ex-UK, the cost of using the miles within Europe usually offered little or no saving against EZY etc. Also, the majority of useful flights went from LHR, and the connection cost in miles to start a trip from MAN (our local airport (I say local, it’s a 100 miles away!)) meant that it was hardly worth the hassle when compared to a cheap flight direct from LPL or MAN.
So the miles went unused, and by the start of 2012, thanks to credit card spend, I had around 38,000 BMI miles, while M had around 26,000. A little reading on the BMI forum on FT (thanks everyone!!) educated me that we not only had enough miles to do a cash+miles redemption to the Americas, we could also do a stopover in each direction, and pooling our miles, one direction (not the annoying little blokes with the silly haircuts!) could be done in Business class. We decided that we would go towards the end of May, taking advantage of two extra free days leave thanks to the Queen’s Jubilee (two birds, one stone comes to mind – being out of the country for the Jubilee was fine by me as I’m not exactly what you would call a Royalist!!)
Plan A was to try and do both North and South America, and making a pilgrimage to the Welsh colony in Patagonia. However, there’s no Star Alliance presence in Argentina beyond Buenos Aires, and internal flights were prohibitively expensive to Puerto Madryn and Trelew airports in Patagonia. If you haven’t heard of it, that part of the world is pretty special to most Welsh people – thousands left Wales in the 19th Century to look for a better, fairer life, and set up a colony in Patagonia’s Chubut Valley. Today, while their descendants are fiercely patriotic Argentines, they retain their Welsh heritage, and there are several thousand who are fluent in Welsh along with Spanish. As I say, that is a pilgrimage that I will make one day, but not this year!
In February or thereabouts though, there were rumours that the Wales football team might be making and end of season trip to the US, to face Mexico in New York. This was soon confirmed, and Plan B was soon set in motion – we would tour a few cities in the USA, making sure that we were in New York by May 27th for the Wales game!
I spent the next few weeks completely neglecting my poor wife, trawling through various booking systems trying to find the best availability to the States, and researching the best places to visit etc. Again FT was an absolute goldmine of knowledge, and I would soon learn that the best Star Alliance option to cross the Atlantic was US Airways, as they don’t charge YQ, so award redemptions on US are much cheaper than any other carrier.
The second thing I worked into my planning was that the actual European starting point for the trip made very little difference to the overall cost. Thanks to UK APD, the small cost of taking an FR or EZY flight to another USAir destination on the continent or Dublin meant that the cost would work out pretty much the same whichever route we took, so we could be pretty flexible The only other decision to make was which direction to upgrade to Business class. We chose the inbound leg of the trip, the reasoning being that the excitement and anticipation would more than make up for being in economy on the way over, and that we would be more tired after a long trip, and therefore more appreciative of J class on the way home.
So the booking was finally made in April, and looked like this, starting on Sunday 20th May, returning home on June 5th.
Outbound
BRU-PHL (stop) LGA-CLE-LAS (all in economy, and a Ryanair MAN-CRL to get us to Brussels the day before)
Inbound
LAS-ORD (Stop) ORD-CLE-PHL-GLA (ORD-PHL via CLE being in Y due to lack of J availability, and the other sectors being in J)
Flying back to Glasgow wasn’t a big deal, as there were plenty of reasonably priced train options home from there, but I knew that the GLA flight was a 757, and that the A330 was a much better J product on USAir, so I would keep checking availability (neglecting my dear wife even further) to see if a better option came available.
Alas, ‘twas so! Within a couple of weeks, PHL-MUC-MAN on the A330 (MUC-MAN on LH) came available, as well as a direct business/first class ORD-PHL at a much more convenient time than the previous booking. Was it worth the £20 change fee per person? Yep, an absolute no-brainer!!
So it was settled, we would spend 3 nights in Philly, 5 in NYC, 4 in Vegas, and 3 in Chicago to complete our mini US-tour. Looking back now, I do wonder how my wife puts up with me!! She was not only willing to let me do such a trip with my friend, but I really did spend countless hours staring at my laptop over a period of weeks planning the entire trip!! How many wives would put up with that??! (Don’t worry, keep reading ‘till the end, I get her a nice gift!!) The net is a fantastic resource though, and thanks to Tripadvisor, Hotwire etc, I bagged some nice hotels at decent prices, and got some great dining, nightlife etc tips!