In the UK, the shiniest prize for the miles and points fan is the companion voucher on the BA premium American Express card... unless, of course, you don’t have a companion! Back in my Avios-chasing prime, I was single (very single), and thus ignored it. But it's also a rich-get-richer kind of deal - sure, a couple can save hundreds of thousands of Avios with it, but only if they
have hundreds of thousands of Avios. Several years of non-rev and then status-less flying mean that now I do have a companion, I don't have the points...
Fortunately I had stuck with the BA card’s less glamorous cousin, the Lloyds Avios Duo - now closed to new signups, although mine limps on despite even the closure of the standalone Avios scheme. The duo here refers not to a second traveller, but to a second card, with both an Amex and Mastercard contributing to a shared spend target. Better still, that target was £3K softer than on the BA-branded offering; the £24 annual fee was trivial; and, uniquely I believe, foreign spend was fee-free despite earning points. Thus I was able to unlock an upgrade voucher in short order, despite my relatively modest annual spend, a large part of which is either non-Amex in flavour and/or euro-denominated.
The obvious use of this voucher is to redeem for a return flight for one passenger in Club World, for which you’ll be charged merely the World Traveller Plus rate. More concretely, for Seattle on peak travel dates, that’s 100K instead of 150K avios. But that would constrain our travel plans to a handful of date combinations that offered both out- and inbound availability; and I’d still have to break the ‘never paid for longhaul J’ streak for Alaina’s ticket. There is an alternative way to use the voucher, though - to upgrade two passengers on a one-way flight. That reduced the availability search to an outbound flight with two seats in U, travelling back whenever we wanted.
But how to book those London-bound legs? Across the pond, legacy carriers routinely price one-ways not at just more than half a return ticket, but more than a return ticket. Conveniently, the rise of ‘low cost longhaul’ has brought with it the point-to-point pricing model that is now standard on European shorthaul (where the LCCs have long reigned). In particular, Norwegian would happily fly the pair of us from Seattle to London - only - in the front row of the Premium cabin of a shiny new 787-9 for £1040 all-in. That was barely more than the £982 BA wanted for the fees, charges and seat selection on our outbound redemption, never mind the Avios and voucher.
Of course, 1A/C in Norwegian Premium, whilst arguably the best seats on the plane, are still seats. So this would indeed mark the end of my streak of beds in the sky. But it looked substantially better than World Traveller Plus, and I put in tens of thousands of miles in Economy back in the day. How bad could it be?
With my wife's birthday falling on a Saturday, that made a natural midpoint for two weeks stateside: fly out one weekend; spend almost a week in Seattle; move on to Portland, a birthday trip within a birthday trip; then reverse direction, returning first to Seattle for another almost-week, and then to the UK on the final weekend. Whilst pleasingly symmetric, this didn't coincide with redemption space, so instead we shifted to a Tuesday outbound: trading an initial weekend stateside for a final one, followed by a Monday afternoon flight (which, due to the cruelty of time zones, would not deliver us to Gatwick until Tuesday morning).
Generally, birthdays don't shift to suit U class availability - and nor would the Portland beer festival we had spotted would be happening that day. Thus our trip became rather lopsided; all the more so once we decided to extend our Oregonian detour to Eugene.
However, the resulting schedule arguably worked better. Arriving late Tuesday, we would have a relaxed introduction to Seattle with a couple of days to get our bearings and shake off the jet lag. Friday morning we could then join the
Coast Starlight down to Portland, where we'd remain for the full weekend before another morning train - this time the
Amtrak Cascades - on Monday would convey us to Eugene. Our reasons for heading there being somewhat spurious, a 24 hour visit seemed sufficient; thus the next afternoon we would rejoin the Coast Starlight for the remainder of its northbound run. That would then give us a full week to hit the Seattle tourist trail before flying home.
This new arrangement would also help with an issue I overlooked when choosing flights: the eye-watering price of downtown Seattle accommodation. This held generally for the summer, but particularly for that first week. By reducing our initial stay to three nights, we’d already improved things - and then it occurred to me that we could skip downtown until the longer visit on our return arc. On both my previous trips to Seattle, I'd booked an AirBnB - and whilst
I only got to stay in one of them, I was willing to take the gamble when I realised that three nights in an entire suburban property would run us less than a single hotel night in the city proper. Once I found an apartment with not just its own garden but its own urban goat farm, animal fan Alaina needed no convincing.
For short visits to unfamiliar cities, however, I am a strong advocate of convenience over price, and thus favoured city centre hotels for our time in Portland and Eugene. I'd looked into Kimpton hotels for both Seattle and Portland, attracted by their recent incorporation into IHG rewards, where they could help with my accelerate targets. In the end I only booked with them for Portland, after discovering their additional amenity fees had distorted their place in the (pre-tax and charges) price rankings on IHG’s listings for Seattle. Still, the Hotel Vintage looked ideally located for Union Station and central Portland, and I was keen to give this well-regarded brand a try before they made their way to Europe.
Accelerate needs met, I swapped to properties where I could make use of existing Hilton Honors status for the rest of our trip. In Eugene, that meant, unsurprisingly, the Hilton Eugene; whilst for our six nights in Seattle I couldn't resist the Beaux-Arts styling of the Arctic Club building, now a Doubletree.
OK, looks like a plan! Let's get started…