Originally Posted by
m3red
How are you bringing the wines in?
If you bring them in they will take them off you. What you have to understand about dubai and the region is you will not have an easy time getting the correct answer and people will provide you with inconsistent advice.
My advice is either ship the wine home and pay the duty there or bring 5 bottles each.
You are lucky you don't live here, we pay a lot of money for wine in dubai from Les clos at the airport and I would never dream of going over the allowance these days.
Checked luggage in a shipper box, so not at all hidden, though I might be able to cram a 6-pack shipper box into a spare duffel bag I had tucked in my suitcase--but not a 12-pack shipper. So it's not like we'd be able to sneak through--and not that I'd attempt that.
It's not the end of the world, though. We've already resolved to return to South Africa soon, and we won't be so foolish as to fly EK with a stopover in DXB on the return.
Originally Posted by
m3red
Re AS there are a lot of people who are *viewed* as having earned miles on AS relatively easily and use them for long haul f flights which upsets skywards members due to taking up availability and also how hard it is for eK members to earn miles. This is not helped by the frequent postings from as flyers asking to spend 1/2 days in an airport lounge because they can't afford a hotel!
*obvouisly not all
The 200,000 miles round-trip required to redeem an EK F redemption is as much as an MVP Gold 75K-level (top-tier) flyer earns in a full
year of flying. That represents several thousand dollars of cash outlay at a very minimum and given Alaska's often high fares, usually much more--and on Alaska's short flights on its limited route network, that's a
lot of BIS time, and it's harder to earn that number of miles on partners with the increasing number of non-100%-earning fares. So it's hardly "free."
To be fair, the prime consideration in the (fairly short) other thread for visiting the lounge the night before was to enjoy the lounge's amenities in a way that isn't possible with an 8am departure. I don't think the postings on that topic are nearly as "frequent" as you say they are.
