So, why Seoul? Was Willard inspired to follow in the footsteps of his friends on the BA board? Nope, truth be to tell, we decided on the destination prior to hearing about that MEGA-Trip, so the reasons where much more pedestrian:

Due to new work commitments, it had been well over 12 months since our last trip, and withdrawal symptoms were setting in.

Again, due to the new client, and more specifically, the non-flight travel expenses that had been racking up (at least Virgin Trains have a Frequent Traveller program!) I'd gained a BA-Amex 2-4-1 voucher, and the balance of my bmi Diamond Club miles had gone over to BA to shore up the already impressive balance that had been accumulating there.

Then BA announced a discount sale on awards, but with only a short sale window, and the lure of 20% off was just too good to miss!

Since the target date of travel was constrained by work commitments, we were looking at a window from February to April 2013, and getting 2 seats in F on BA with that little notice was a challenge, and was limiting our choices. ICN came to our rescue, since it hadn't yet made it onto the BA award map, but was in the textual booking tool, not many people seemed to have realised it's existence, and so it was showing 2F availability on virtually every flight, giving us unprecedented flexibility. We'd never been to Seoul, weather didn't look too bad in the March/April time period we'd selected, and there were no Visa issues for UK passports.

So, ICN it was!

On-line booking was painless, though it was a bit of a surprise to see that BA wanted 15 quid a segment to book seats on the domestic connectors, and this generated a strong incentive to chase up my BA Gold card (Thanks Nikki!) that I was due from the bmi (ahem) merger.
Hotel bookings started to raise the concern that Seoul might not be a budget destination, but careful use of a combination of HHonours points (pre-devaluation too, lucky guess!) and Starwood SPG50 rates gave us 10 nights with guaranteed Executive Lounge access at a reasonable rate.

When we selected our travel dates and destination, there were various contingencies to be considered, family emergencies that could cause cancellation, work commitments and so on, but I'd have to say that if we had considered it at all, the possibility that snow might be a disrupting factor in the UK at the end of March would probably have been slightly below the risk that North Korea would declare all-out Thermonuclear War on the Western world (Oh, Wait......).

By T minus 5 days, snow was, very much, an issue! On Friday, whilst the weather was quite mild in my current client posting in Edinburgh, colleagues who travel in from Glasgow were reporting snow drifts and were working from home... I started looking intently at the BA departures from MAN, and after some discussion, I booked backup tickets on Virgin Trains from Manchester Piccadilly to London. The journey home started off fine, but the further South I got, the worse the weather got, and at the point where I was taking my taxi home from the local railway station, things are looking pretty unsavoury, with the taxi slewing left and right on untreated roads covered in snow, and, on the final walk, with me having to stop every few yards to clear the drift of snow that was building up on the leading edge of my wheeled baggage.

The next morning was a scene from a Christmas Card, no sign of the furrow I'd ploughed to the door with my bags the night before, but an interesting, vaguely car-shaped, mound where I usually park my car.

So, a bit of re-planning required! The original plan was for me to travel the 48 mile round-trip to collect Pat first thing on Saturday morning, do any final packing, have a short meeting with my co-director to cover off anything that may happen whilst I'm away, and then get a lift to Liverpool to catch a train to Manchester Airport. Chances of me getting the car off the drive was looking slim, chances of me making the round-trip to Pat and back again were definitely not in my favour. Luckily, my co-director is one of those people whom we love to hate in these weather conditions, one of those who sit smugly in the snarled-up traffic with a fixed grin of superiority, in short, he's the owner of a 4-Wheel drive vehicle.....
So, an appropriate level of begging has secured the promise of a run to pick up Pat, and the Honda CR-V makes short work of the road conditions, and I've got Pat ready to go and only running an hour or so behind schedule. We sit down and do two weeks worth of day-to-day business in just less than an hour, and make Liverpool Lime Street in good time to make the direct train to Manchester Airport (which is pretty much the only airport in the UK that is integrated enough to allow you to wheel your bags from the train to the check-in, and thus uniquely supports this mode of transport, as long as you are travelling from Terminal 1 or 2 – we were, of course, going from Terminal 3). The train laughs in the face of the snow, and leaves on time, with the only problem being the icy blast every time the door opens en-route.

Never mind Willard, this will be my first flight on BA for over 10 years, and it will have been nearly 13 years since I moved all of my revenue business from BA/OneWorld to bmi/Star Alliance because of the woeful state of BA ground handling. This was BA's chance to show how much it had got it's act together, and how much it's front-line “let me be very clear as to how little your problems as a customer concern me” attitude had been changed in it's multi-million pound re-branding as a “we're not a low-cost airline we're a full service airline, and we'll show you there's a difference” business.
Saturday morning things we're looking good, BA's dedicated First Class customer service, YouFirst were very happy to advise me on the status of my domestic connection, and promised to call me back with an update before I left, and what's more, they did! Really, this is just the kind of pro-active, customer focused support I'd been hoping for, perhaps things really have changed, perhaps I'll never need to see another Lufthansa lounge again!

….To be continued....

Willard the Bear – I, of course, had no visibility of any of this, I was busy on Saturday doing a briefing for Beeker on Champagne tasting etiquette and which side to sit on when I'm being photographed so as not to upstage me.