TheFlyingDoctor

I always find people's decision-making for a trip interesting, especially if there's a miles and points angle to be considered. Plus I like to know how much something costs so I can decide if it should be filed on the "maybe one day" or "not unless I win the lottery" wish list! But if a picture-less couple of thousand words about planning rather than travelling doesn't sound like your cup of tea, the action starts in the next post.


Svalbard has been on my travel to-do list for a long time. This year the stars seemed to align to make it happen somewhat affordably. I’d built up a stockpile of club Carlson points through last year’s travel and credit card churn; the Radisson Blu Polar was an appealing way to burn them. A good year for my employer meant I had a bonus which I could offset against unpaid leave -I always prefer more travel time to more money, and make use of this scheme to some extent each year, but there are still bills to pay! The only missing piece of the puzzle was flights – until Oneworld member Finnair announced Svalbard’s airport Longyearbyen as a new destination from Helsinki. With my main programme being the BA Executive Club, I could either fund the flying through avios, or, since HEL is a shorthaul plus route attracting double tier points, put together an interesting status run to a city I’d been keen to sample anyway.

However, the timings were tricky, with just 3 flights week for eight weeks across July / August. These came with unpleasant arrival / departure hours - most LYR services seem to be a way to squeeze an extra rotation out of an airframe that would otherwise be attracting airport fees. My club Carlson balance would only cover two nights at the Radisson, and whilst I could justify paying for a third or fourth it would be a waste for that to be used for only a few hours post- or pre-flight.

It soon became clear that I’d have to build a big loop, using another carrier from mainland Norway then come home via Helsinki. Given the schedules and my hotel budget, the best option was Norwegian’s OSL-LYR service on a Wednesday evening, then onwards to HEL using Finnair the following Sunday. With a 2:45 – AM – departure time, I would rely on the confusion of the midnight sun to treat this as a very late Saturday flight and thus only need three nights at the Radisson.

Just to make things even more complicated – but save a pair of flights to/from the UK – I had originally planned to position myself to Oslo from Madrid following a work trip to Santander at the start of July. Surprisingly there were no problems getting award availability for the desired nights in Longyearbyen – but everything in Helsinki looked sold out or marked up three-fold compared to later in the month. A quick check of the special events calendar at work revealed that a major medical conference was taking place, so not being able to compete with pharmaceutical budgets, I accepted I’d have to split the trip. (Ultimately this worked in my favour as the Santander trip fell through!)

Rolling forward a week would hit one of just 2 days in July when there was no award availability at the RBP so, with prices and availability also back to normality in Helsinki, I settled on a mid-July itinerary. With this established, I set about the dance of bookings - with so few options in the arctic, I didn’t want to be stuck holding a hotel or flight only to have the other fell through. So I worked through in order of cancellability.

Club Carlson award nights are fully cancellable, so they went in first: 70,000 points each, versus an asking price of 1990 NOK. At the time of booking, that was just under £165; thanks to Brexit, that jumped to £185, so something like £2.60 per thousand points. There are plenty of ways to get a better figure than that, but I often find such valuations a poor reflection of reality. Yes, I might find a £200 hotel night to use them against instead, but if there’s a perfectly acceptable room for £70 elsewhere in the same town, I can’t consider that a true saving. Conversely, wherever I went in Longyearbyen was going to be hard on the wallet, so I’m happy enough with this return. A quick look at availability after booking confirmed I’d got the last rooms on points (the cash price point also jumped up), so perhaps waiting until four months before check-in had been pushing my luck.

Then it was over to Norwegian to book a flight to get me to that room. This was perfectly good value: £95 for their mid-range ticket type, which includes hold bag, seat selection (I definitely wanted a window for arctic views!) and wifi. Although I’d flown extensively with Norwegian back when I lived in Scotland, that was before they launched a loyalty programme. So I signed up for that on the off chance it becomes relevant; seems to be 2% cashback in place of mileage-based approach, and then the ability to select status perks for each six flights you take. I like the gamification angle of letting you choose your progression, although I doubt I’ll ever trigger a choice…

With a 16:25 departure from OSL it’d be dull to sit around an airport hotel but I didn’t want to chance a same day connection. So I decide to fly to Oslo relatively early on the Tuesday, do something touristy with that afternoon / the following morning, and then head over to the airport at my leisure. Paying cash, the best rate was the Radisson Blu Scandinavia at £71 (the part points, part cash rate was dire). I’d stayed there quite happily earlier in the year, but I couldn’t resist adding to my collection of Oslo Club Carlson properties by paying an extra £17 for the Radisson Blu Plaza instead. As usual, I needed an excuse to justify this; settling on the argument that its particularly central location would be more convenient for my compressed itinerary.

With a 4 hour cooling off period on the Norwegian booking, it was back to Radisson to commit to that cash night. It turned out that I needn’t have worried as it was also fully flexible. Moreover, it would include breakfast - a notable omission from the description for the award nights, but I was hoping gold status would resolve that.

Finally (for the Svalbard portion of the trip), I needed my departure flight, so it was Finnair’s turn. For this I’d already settled on cash rather than avios, having discovered a quirk of their ticketing. Whilst the LYR-HEL leg booked as a one-way priced up at 3506NOK, a LYR-HEL-LHR routing gets treated as an open-jaw return for 3192 NOK, even with a three night stopover in Helsinki! I also knew that the 5pm service to Heathrow would be an A321, and that the super-legroom seats on row 22 were still available on my chosen date, albeit for a price. To be precise, it’s 227NOK for one of those, versus 114 for a variety of standard seats, but I’ve found that if you resist the urge to translate to your home currency, it’s easier to cope with such fees. Claiming another window seat for LYR-HEL was a much more reasonable 57NOK, and I got stung for an extra 50NOK credit card fee. But hey, it all lined up nicely, right?


Barely a week later the above missive found its way to my inbox, throwing my well-laid plans into disarray (I believe Burns had something to say on this topic). The suggested alternative destinations would be of no use since I was already committed to being on Svalbard, so I would need to be rebooked onto another carrier. Since the entire season of flights had been scrubbed, I figured there would soon be many others in a similar position to me, and scrabbling for the same limited spaces both on flights and in hotels. As such, I decided to get the jump on them and immediately make my own alternative arrangements, before simply putting in a request for a refund from Finnair.

Clearly, I would be backtracking to Norway. Instead of my very-early Sunday departure to Helsinki, I could fly back early morning to Oslo with Norwegian. However, I would definitely need another hotel night for Saturday in that case. As the Monday departure is an evening one, it seemed better to get two more days in Svalbard for the price of two nights’ hotel bill, rather than no extra sightseeing time for the price of one. Just to make that harder, Sunday night was completely sold out at the Radisson… fortunately some searching revealed space at the Svalbard Hotell and Lodge. Booking.com would put me in a ‘large double or twin’ which bumped up the square footage but more importantly meant I’d be in the main building, where breakfast is located. (Crossing the street for breakfast may sound minor, but with arctic temperatures and the local custom of removing your footwear at the entrance to buildings, would be a notable downside to the standard rooms). This was somewhat cheaper than the Radisson – 1690NOK, which I pre-paid and thus locked in at a pre-Brexit rate that was nearly 10% better than what I received in July.

Since I would now be arriving at OSL five minutes into Tuesday, I wanted an airport hotel to maximise sleep before heading back to London at a more sociable hour. With a few Club Carlson points still left over, I could part-pay with points at either the Radisson (£82 and 20K points vs £109) or the Park Inn (£71 and 10K points vs £95). Despite the lack of breakfast, I opt for the latter to try and exercise a modicum of restraint with regards to my hotel bill, given those unexpected extra nights in Svalbard. As it happens, these rates are freely cancellable (unlike a pure cash advance rate), so when Club Carlson launched a sale later in the year I swapped it out for a £77 cash rate (valuing 10K points at rather more than £6).

I was also in need of a flight home from Oslo – fortunately, I hadn’t yet decided how I was getting there in the first place, so could book a straightforward return. OSL has become a popular station for the tier point-running subset of the BA board, at least to position themselves for attractive ex-EU fares (including the ‘Viking’ mistake pricing). Through their discussions I learnt that the ex-BMI midhaul A321 was being sent there (and various other shorthaul locations) for the summer schedule. Whilst Club Europe is typically identical seating to Euro Traveller – the legroom eroded by densification – on these birds there’s a fixed 23 seat J cabin with a flatbed product! That meant I could try BA’s other narrow body business configuration, with the chance at a solo seat – but at Club Europe rather than Club World prices.

Taking this option for the outbound service just didn’t make sense – an 8am departure means an early start for me and thus minimal use of the lounge. The return A321 service – the second of the day - was ideally timed; between the airport lounge and on-board brunch I would be able make up for that lack of breakfast at the Park Inn.

The public price for M out, C back was £84+£199 = £283. I could get that down to £194 with hotline; since it features a leg in club I can spend up to 11,250 avios to save £75. This 0.66p per avios is lower than what most people look for, but I have plenty of them and access to staff travel, so it’s an acceptable rate of return (especially given earnings of 2 avios per £ on my obsolete BMI credit card). But then I noticed both legs are available as redemptions. That priced up at £42.50 + 19,250 avios – since I’m a lowly BAEC blue there’s only a loss of 1103 avios earning since hotline would book into G/I class, so net it’s £151.5 saving for 20353 avios – 0.74p each. Since I won’t be anywhere close to status, the loss of 45 tier points is inconsequential. Deal.

I also stump up £22 to guarantee one of the last two solo seats on the inbound, picking the further forward 6F instead of 8F in the final row, in the hope that it gives me a choice of meal. For the outbound (in economy) there are no exit row seats available and £15 to select from the remaining assortment doesn’t seem worth it, so I decide to take my chances at check-in instead.

From some improbable routings via Spain or Finland to a straightforward out and back via Oslo, my arctic adventure (mark 2) was now finally set to go! But what about Spain? Originally I had planned to be in Santander for a conference, and although I couldn't secure funding to attend, my partner and I had been excited about the opportunity, and considered going anyway. But since it would now be a leisure rather than work trip, we weren't restricted to Santander (or Spain for that matter, although we stuck with it). We could also adjust the timings to suit, so we decided to tie together several plans: visiting family in Holland; making a start on wedding preparations by scouting out venues; and when that got too stressful, jetting off to somewhere sunny for a relaxing break together. That meant we needed a destination with (non-stop, since Alaina is our environmental conscience) connections to both the Netherlands and the U.K.

Transavia is a Dutch carrier owned by Air France-KLM, with a main base at Amsterdam Schiphol and a fleet of 737-700 and (primarily) -800s. Despite nearly 50 years of operation – albeit only half of that under KLM - I couldn’t find any mention of them here on the trip report forum. Perhaps that’s because of their low-cost nature – service is all-economy, with up to 189 pax packed onto a -800 and the usual model of low lead-in prices driven up by ancillaries, including charging for any refreshment desired even for this near-five hour flight.

Bookings come in one of three flavours – Basic, Plus, and Max - with per-leg pricing so we wouldn’t get stung for only wanting the outbound instead of a return. Basic is very much so: an assigned seat and 10kg of hand luggage to stash above it. Adding €35 for plus bundles in 20kg of hold luggage, a choice of ‘standard’ seat, changes up to 14 days before departure for just fare difference (on basic there’s a €50 fee) and 250 flying blue miles. Max allows your hand luggage allowance to be split across a main bag and accessory; ups the hold luggage to 30kg; drops the change-without-fee time limit to 2 hours before departure; doubles the flying blue miles; adds priority boarding; and allows selection from any seat. However, it’s €50 more than plus, which with only the extra leg room seats and speedy boarding of interest doesn’t add up for me. I was therefore pleased on proceeding with a plus booking to find that seat selection could be upgraded to anywhere in the cabin for another €6, and used that to grab what looked like an over wing exit row. Final bill: €160 each.

To get home we’d be dipping once again into the avios stash; BA don’t offer this route, but Iberia Express do, although they only had space in business. That meant a rather steep 20,000 avios each, although the taxes were a rather more agreeable £9 and there were no extra fees for seat selection so I dropped us into the front row.

Those booked, all that was left was to find somewhere to stay– for this we played it safe and went by Trip Advisor’s guidance. When we discovered the (then) top property, Gold by Marina, was on heavy discount through booking.com, we saw no need to search further (Other than to confirm that their slightly confusing name of "Gold Playa del Ingles - Only Adults" corresponded to the same place). Located in Maspalomas, whilst not directly on the waterfront it ticked the "close to the coast" checkbox and the combination of two pools and no children should offer plenty of opportunity for relaxing on site too. Six nights in a standard room - which includes a small kitchen area - would run us €649. But for another €80 we could both guarantee a high level room with balcony offering sea views and get breakfast bundled in, which seemed well worth the extra. Sold!

So, between three destinations, four airlines, five hotels and six flights I had my summer travel sorted... In retrospect, the Finnair kerfuffle was for the best. I’m sure I’ll pick up a few nights in Helsinki at some stage, but when am I likely to pass through Longyearbyen again? By extending this visit I was able to fit in an excursion I had previously written off as too much of a time commitment. Through that I was able to push even further north by boat, to the Russian settlement of Pyramiden – which turned out to be a definite highlight of my trip to Svalbard. Whilst I always like to have a plan, I’m always happy to reconfigure them- and as Gran Canaria turned out to show, spontaneity is no bad thing either.