In the midst of my recent trip and I realized its a tale of polar opposites, so I will try to put a report togther.

Background:
I work for an airline - many plusses and minuses to that, but one of the pluses is the ability to "non-rev," or travel at a discounted rate. Now while this is certainly a benefit, its not as glamourous as you have heard - all travel is standby, and I've heard many a story about people having to purchase a full fare ticket after being stuck for many days.

The impetus of this trip was the US victory in Wednesday's world cup semifinal. With the scheduling of the final on Sunday, an easy weekend trip could be taken with just a day off from work on Monday.

My plan was to fly over standby on Lufthansa's A380 SFO-FRA, and return on a confirmed ticket using frequent flyer miles. So my first decision was how to fly back. A quick search easily found first class seats on both Lufthansa and Singapore. I have to mention how nice CO's new online reward search engine is...I was able to find ton's of LH options on it.

Now the choice was which airline to fly. With LH I had access to the First Class Terminal at FRA. The LH first hard product is none too impressive (relatively speaking) - I would have liked to connected via ZRH to Swiss, but Swiss did not have any first class availability. In the end I ended up on SQ as I had just enough KrisFlyer miles available to me for a first class redemption...and who knows when the next time I will have an opportunity to fly SQ first with their restrictions on the 77W and A380.