MJLogan
Jul 16, 06, 11:22 am
Bottom line: I got caught up in the game of scoring an international upgrade, and lost sight of the real goal--to have a great trip. I wonder who else has a similar story.
I was pretty shocked a couple of months ago to find upgrade space available--at a B fare only a couple hundered bucks above the cheapest coach fares I could find--for two R/T tickets from Los Angeles to London and Paris, for late June/early July. The routing way a bit weird, but that's the FT way, isn't it?
My friend wanted to go a few days early and spend extra time in Paris. The only way I could get him there with an upgrade was LAX-SAN(on AA)-DTW-CDG. The WP agent tried mightily to access the DTW-CDG upgrade without adding the pointless detour to San Diego, but she couldn't do it. And of course, my friend's bags never made the transfer from AA to NW at SAN. They were flown back to LAX and sent to Paris on a direct AF flight the next day. Because he couldn't get any info from NW about the ETA of his bags, he spent his first day in Paris shopping for clothes.
I was able to meet him a few days later in London via a normal LAX-DTW-LGW route, with no problems.
We flew home together, on the exhausting routing of CDG-AMS-MEM-LAX. CDG-AMS was in KL's "Europe Select," which is just coach on a 737 with a sort-of edible mini-lunch and a newspaper. I reserved us aisles across from each other, so it was tolerable but nothing special. AMS-MEM was on an ancient NW DC-10. I think the cabin staff was recalled from the desert along with the plane--both plane and FAs were semi-functional and creeky. The IFE wasn't working at our seats, the seats themselves were not particularly comfortable, the food was not at all good and the cabin was stuffy. The MEM-LAX leg, by contrast, was as nice as domestic first on NW gets--both food and service was better than in WBC, and the seat was nearly the same.
About midway across the Atlantic, my friend and I decided that--as long as we both had aisle seats--we would have been much happier in coach on a nice AF 777, flying directly from CDG to LAX. We'd have saved a few hundred bucks, a bunch of WP miles and several hours of our lives.
So--who else occasionally forgets the real point of travelling in pursuit of miles, upgrades or status? Of course, those things often ARE the real point for us, but sometimes I just want to have a nice vacation...
I was pretty shocked a couple of months ago to find upgrade space available--at a B fare only a couple hundered bucks above the cheapest coach fares I could find--for two R/T tickets from Los Angeles to London and Paris, for late June/early July. The routing way a bit weird, but that's the FT way, isn't it?
My friend wanted to go a few days early and spend extra time in Paris. The only way I could get him there with an upgrade was LAX-SAN(on AA)-DTW-CDG. The WP agent tried mightily to access the DTW-CDG upgrade without adding the pointless detour to San Diego, but she couldn't do it. And of course, my friend's bags never made the transfer from AA to NW at SAN. They were flown back to LAX and sent to Paris on a direct AF flight the next day. Because he couldn't get any info from NW about the ETA of his bags, he spent his first day in Paris shopping for clothes.
I was able to meet him a few days later in London via a normal LAX-DTW-LGW route, with no problems.
We flew home together, on the exhausting routing of CDG-AMS-MEM-LAX. CDG-AMS was in KL's "Europe Select," which is just coach on a 737 with a sort-of edible mini-lunch and a newspaper. I reserved us aisles across from each other, so it was tolerable but nothing special. AMS-MEM was on an ancient NW DC-10. I think the cabin staff was recalled from the desert along with the plane--both plane and FAs were semi-functional and creeky. The IFE wasn't working at our seats, the seats themselves were not particularly comfortable, the food was not at all good and the cabin was stuffy. The MEM-LAX leg, by contrast, was as nice as domestic first on NW gets--both food and service was better than in WBC, and the seat was nearly the same.
About midway across the Atlantic, my friend and I decided that--as long as we both had aisle seats--we would have been much happier in coach on a nice AF 777, flying directly from CDG to LAX. We'd have saved a few hundred bucks, a bunch of WP miles and several hours of our lives.
So--who else occasionally forgets the real point of travelling in pursuit of miles, upgrades or status? Of course, those things often ARE the real point for us, but sometimes I just want to have a nice vacation...