Planning
Last year we had a blast going to
Krakow and Beijing in the summer, using the North America to North Asia via the Atlantic award on UA, which at the time cost 105,000 miles. As soon as the trip was over, we began planning for the summer vacation for this year. We would like to do another North America to Asia via the Atlantic award, and had our eyes on Helsinki being the stopover point, and Sapporo our destination.
Award Booking
We made the first booking in December last year for the trip in July this year. We know booking this far ahead would usually allow us to get around the Starnet blocking by UA and seats are more readily available, especially for the trans Atlantic segments. This would give us enough time to keep improving on the routing, and thanks to the 1K award fee waiver, we could make as many changes as possible for free. As usual, the actual booking process is like pulling teeth, different agents would be telling us different things, that this type of award is either no longer available or never legal. The hanging up and calling back approach once again worked magic. Once we were able to make the booking, funny thing is that we encountered almost no resistance to numerous changes afterwards. Apparently if the rate desk approves of issuing of the ticket, agents would no longer make up their own rules. The problem really has to do with the fact that UA award chart does not explicitly list what it would cost if we start from the US, and go to Asia via Europe. We redeemed 135,000 miles for this award on business class, the same amount it would cost if we are to start in Asia, and wanted to go to Europe via the US, and that is listed in the award chart. (120K for direct travel between regions, 135K for travel involving a third region)
Obstacles
We spent the early part of the year fine tuning the itinerary, adding a couple of less than 24 hour transit points so we could visit a few more cities, and also adjusted the routing when schedule changes messed up the connections. We thought we had a pretty decent itinerary by March, and would be able to relax and start working on the hotels and planning what to do in each location. But in April the volcano in Iceland erupted and caused enormous flight disruptions in Europe, it's less clear if we could really go on a trip that's planned this far ahead, especially it involves many stops in Scandinavia, one of the most affected region.
Just when the volcano problem seemed to die down, another disaster struck. One day in early May my back was in great pain, and once I lied down in the bed, I could not get up for the next day. Something was wrong, very wrong, when I finally was able to get up and saw the doctor, I was diagnosed with a disc injury, which could take months to recover, assuming there's not deeper problem which requires surgery. Taking the heavy dosage of pain killers and muscle relaxant the doctor prescribed did not really seem to help, and I could hardly walk a few steps. There's no hope taking a vacation in two months anymore. Delaying the trip was also not an option, by this time, it's impossible to find availability of the same routing by pushing the trip out by a month, or two. Not really wanting to see all the hard work in securing the tickets go down the drain, I began some intensive physical therapy, and was able to improve the mobility quite a bit. By early June, I was able to survive a short flight from San Francisco to Phoenix, and was also able to hop on a bike, and while the pain was still intense, I no longer needed to rely on the drugs. I became cautiously optimistic that I could make the trip after all, and resumed the planning and booking of the hotels, but we still booked mostly the higher refundable rates just in case.
Final itinerary
7/2 Fri UA 328 SFO 11:55pm ORD 6:02am (+1)
7/3 Sat SK 946 ORD 4:25pm ARN 7:45am (+1)
7/5 Mon SK 1417 ARN 7:10am CPH 8:25am
7/6 Tue KF 638 CPH 8:10am HEL 10:45am
7/8 Thu LH 3107 HEL 9:25am FRA 10:55am
7/8 Thu LH 736 FRA 2:30pm NGO 8:50am (+1)
7/9 Fri NH 705 NGO 10:15am CTS 11:55am
7/12 Mon NH 2152 CTS 7:50am NRT 9:25am
7/12 Mon NH 207 NRT 11:50am MUC 5:00pm
7/13 Tue LH 458 MUC 4:15pm SFO 7:10pm
The itinerary starts from San Francisco, and the destination is Sapporo, Japan with a stopover in Helsinki. And using the less than 24 hour rule, we would be able to spend a day in Stockholm, Copenhagen and Munich as well. Initially we were to start on Saturday morning on a United flight to Chicago and transit to an SAS flight to Stockholm, and the United flight is on the new 767 3-class international configuration plane. Subsequent schedule changes caused the flight to become a 757, so we switched to the early morning 6am flight on the 747, thinking it would not be so bad if we could get to sit upstairs on the lie flat seats. Then UA brought back the old 747, and there was no incentive for us to make an effort to get up so early in the morning to catch that flight anymore. So we finally switched to the red eye flight the night before, and this would give us about half a day in Chicago, which we decided to join a bike tour to get warm up for the European trip.
The itinerary allows us to sample five different Star Alliance airlines, with one UA flight, one Blue 1 flight, two SAS flights, three ANA flights and three Lufthansa flights. The total distance is 26571miles, more than 55 hours on plane, but given that's on business class for the majority, it's actually an itinerary we look forward to very much.