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A business traveller’s trip can be quite boring and lonely sometimes. You are away from home and staying at a square box room (no matter how nice the rooms are) in a strange city suffering massive jetlag. Nothing is good on TV and you are too lazy to go over the pages of meeting materials or following up with outstanding work items with home office. Yes, Although I still get excited about taking trips, it is getting harder not seeing my kids. In a blink of eye, they will be grown and won’t talk to me much and share stories with me. There is really nothing exciting about international business travel unless you are young and/or single.

The only little excitement for me on any trips is to take photos, but I am too busy and lazy to write long narratives for my trip reports.

The middle of March took me to the Big Apple, DC and a weekend in South Florida. Not too much to report, but I realized that I have not done a photo trip report specifically on United’s "new" F/C products and international first class lounge experience. This was the trip that I got to experience flying CO for the very first time.

Here is the itinerary:

PEK-NRT-SFO-IAD (UA C except for SFO-IAD in F)
IAD-MIA (UX F)
PBI-EWR (CO Y)
JFK-SFO-NRT-PEK (UA F)

One may ask why I was doing PEK-NRT-SFO instead of flying PEK-SFO directly. The reasons were:

1. I cannot stand the UA 777 C cabins much longer. I get out to NRT to fly the “newly” installed suite seats. I am going to look into flying CO and OZ instead of UA when all US-PEK flights are switched to all 777s later this year.
2. PEK-NRT-PEK will be discontinued by the end of March, and this would be my last time for a long time to connect through NRT
3. Japanese Zen meals
4. More BIS in my quest to reach 2MM lifetime miles on United
5. More UA Global Services qualifying miles - before I switch to OZ and CO.
6. In true FT spirit - take the routing that gives you the most miles.

I think I have written enough. Photos are shown in the following posts.

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PEK-NRT

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NRT-SFO

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SFO-IAD

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IAD-MIA

Nothing to rave about on this 2 ½ hour flight on Explus regional jet. For the record, it was a 777 when I first started IAD-MIA in the middle of 90’s.




PBI-EWR

I usually fly MIA-IAD or MIA-IAD-LGA, but the driving from where I live in Boca Raton to Miami is just far, and the thought of having to wake at 5 am and driving down to take the 9 am flight put the trigger on booking PBI-EWR. Unfortunately the flight experienced a four-hour delay due to bad weather in NYC over the weekend (2nd weekend in March). Catering did not load the food at EWR. Based on what I heard of what had happened to flights in and out of NYC that weekend, I was just happy to make it to NYC for my meeting the next day.





I do miss UA’s E+ seating.

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Time Square

I was debating which hotel to stay in Manhattan. In the end, I picked Marriott Marquis in the center of Time Square over Grand Hyatt. Here are some of the sights during my week-long stay.

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Dinner at METRAZUR located in Grand Central Station
(My old neighbourhood in NYC)

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JFK-SFO Non-PS F


A huge disappointment that my aircraft got switched to a regular 757. I lost interest in taking photos on the flight.

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SFO International First Class Lounge

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SFO-NRT First Class Suite

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NRT International First Class Lounge

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NRT-PEK 777 F

Agneisse

Your food pictures are amazing! How did they taste?

Moomba

Nice pics. I'm hungry....

tomashi

wonderful and entertaining picture report!

some of the pics are quite artsy, which I like! the international F lounge at SFO seems to be quite nice btw

-tom