seattletravelmember

Thanks to the Sapphire Card and the Continental credit card sign up offers, plus 19K in miles transferred from my parents' continental account, plus being able to link and transfer miles between United and Continental, we were able to book a flight over on Lufthansa. All I can say is thank goodness for the Star Alliance. They really came through. It was quite interesting to realize the Continental online system for award travel is better than United's, and also that I ultimately had to call a rep to get the Seattle - Frankfurt non stop, as it was not listed in the Continental system. I guess the lesson is that phone reps and the online system available to us are not always the same.

That's also true for American miles as well. Their reps were quite good and gave us insights about partners not available online. Our return in on Air Tahiti from CDG to LAX, then on to Seattle on Alaska. This flight uses American miles, which I had previously assembled on other credit card offers.

Hopefully some day Alaska (and Delta) will have one way award tickets. I don't like to think how much it cost the airlines for me to call every single morning between Aug 13 and Oct 10 and ask 'are there any American award seats available on July 7 or 8 from Frankfurt, Paris, Brussels, Zurich or London? We are seriously wondering whether the close to half million Alaska miles the 4 of us have are going to ever be any good at getting us an overseas ticket. Maybe we'll use them for Iceland or Alaska itself. After my experiences this time, I have zero confidence I'd ever be able to get a round trip on Alaska or Delta or KLM or Air France in the summer using Alaska miles.

To change the subject:

There was a mention of Vancouver in a post above. Both it and Portland are gateways people from Seattle can / do consider. There are three options: train, the Quick Shuttle or plane (Alaska, Air Canada) going to Vancouver. With the border crossing, it is essentially an extra half day for train or bus. Portland is a lot faster, but unfortunately there's no longer a Super Shuttle bus to Portland, and the Amtrak train is nowhere near PDX.

Well, thanks everyone for your comments and happy travels!