Done with Finals? How about a quick RTW in CX, EK, QF and BA First?
Introduction and Planning
This quarter was not particularly stressful so as my finals came up I really should have been content with staying in Seattle. But I wasn’t. Not at all. I think part of it was that the last month and a half Seattle has been cold, like really cold. Global climate change and La Niņa are working together, not to give us snow (as I would like) but to give us dry, bitterly cold nights. 40s and rainy I can deal with, but this was just too much. I knew I wanted to go somewhere warm for just a few days.
My whole trip couldn’t last more than a week, so a large part of my goal was simply to fly a bunch of world class F products. I knew I’d start out with CX F because it’s so reliably available last minute, so on a Wednesday afternoon (during dead week) I put together an itinerary to get me to Colombo, Sri Lanka. My routing was to be (leaving four days later) SEA-SFO-HKG-SIN-CMB with SFO-HKG-SIN in 3-class F and crappy domestic-F/regional-J for the two other segments. I was forced to overnight in SFO and chose a ~18 hour layover in HKG. I wasn’t bothered by either of these as I was able to do my Radisson stay (for the 50k points promo) at SFO for $118 and use my Q4 Hilton Free Night cert at the Conrad Hong Kong (which was something like $550 a night when I booked). After finding availability on Qantas’ website I called up the EXP desk and booked it in less than five minutes for 67.5k miles + $29.60. This was a bit more than my last CX F redemption which only cost $5.00 in taxes/surcharges.
At this point you might be asking, why Colombo? Because of a ridiculously good one-way F fare. My original plan was to fly CMB-SIN-DXB-LHR-SEA all on EK but for the last segment. Despite having confirmed the A availability on my selected flights I could not book it on Emirates’ website nor elsewhere. At this point I just wanted to book something so went back to ITA Matrix to look at my options on other carriers. I quickly found CMB-SIN-LHR-SEA on EK/QF/BA, which seemed satisfactory as I wanted to give Qantas A380 F another try. My QF flight was showing A1, so I immediately went to Travelocity and purchased it.
And I was done! Well, except for the studying for my two finals on Saturday.