hauteboy

We usually do a family trip in March during miss hauteboy's Spring Break as she gets two weeks off school. It's also SXSW in Austin which makes a mess of traffic so a good reason to bail town. We went to Ireland in 2017 and Provence in 2018. Mrs. hauteboy had been wanting a beach trip for awhile and I wanted to get in a dive trip. I saw that prices to Bonaire and Curacao were quite reasonable from Miami. Unfortunately they didn't meet up with cheap Austin-Miami fares or awards. I also wanted to get in some extra island hopping in the Caribbean, visiting several new TCC 'countries'. I kept waffling between Curacao and Bonaire when I saw that the weekly United Bonaire-Houston flight had opened saver award availability, which is often hard to come by. So I booked the return from Bonaire to Austin for miss and mrs hauteboy. I would spend another 4 days in the Caribbean visiting Curacao, Saba, St. Barts and Anguilla. I found award availability back from St. Maarten to Austin on Delta and booked the other connecting flights on Winair and Insel Air. For our stay in Bonaire, I booked the Courtyard Bonaire Dive Resort on points, a good deal at 12.5k/night. Unfortunately we would only be staying 4 nights so I couldn't take advantage of the 5th free night. I also booked the evening Austin-Miami flight using Avios. I kept holding out hope that the morning flight to Miami would open up award availability but no luck.

Looking at the other islands, I could either do a day trip to Anguilla, Saba or St. Barts out of St. Martin. There are frequent flights or a few companies run ferries. I couldn't find much availability in St. Barts at any reasonable price (Even AirBnb were $400+), so decided on a night in Saba and Anguilla with a daytrip to St. Barts. Coming back from St. Barts, I noticed there were also flights to Grand-Case airport on the French side. Despite it being slightly further to the Marigot-Anguilla ferry, I couldn't pass up getting another airport. Unfortunately I hesitated on booking and the price had jumped 10 EUR on St. Barth Commuter. Hotels in Anguilla are also quite expensive (mostly high end resorts like Four Seasons, Belmond, etc) but there are some reasonably priced AirBnbs.

A few weeks after booking the Bonaire-Curacao-St. Maarten flights, Insel Air went out of business! They lost their air certificate apparently. So called up Priceline and tried to get a refund but all I got was the script 'You want a refund? That's a nonrefundable fare'. So I said leave it. The next day I got a call from Priceline saying the airline had gone out of business and they would issue a refund. Gah. That left me in a bit of a bind to find new flights. The only airlines flying the route were Winair, Divi Divi Air and EZ Air. WinAir times weren't great and I couldn't get EZ Air to price a one-way. So settled on DiviDivi Air, though now the flight left at 9:15 instead of the same 7:25 departure time as the United flight.

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