Season 6 - wherein the pendulum swings back and forth between vanilla family trips and exiting detours. My first mileagerun ever. And too many Tokyo visits, I can't tell them apart anymore.


Episode 1 - The french connection
The season starts with a vanilla trip to Crete in july. It is me and the bonuskid and it is quite relaxed. Sleep late, hang by the pool, toasts, sallads and refreshments in the poolbar. Dinner at the beach grill. Classic Greek charter style. Not that it is charter though, we are going MMX-ARN-CHQ-OSL-ARN-CPH.

Now this trip leads up to the bonus kid having some status miles to his A3 account, and if family trips are going to be the future, perhaps it would be beneficial with more than one gold card in the entourage? So I end up with a second booking in September, CPH-OSL-LPA-OSL-CPH, with direct turn in LPA, on SK in plus, ie earning 200% on A3. Miles enough to make him instantly Star Gold. One could argue this was my first run (ie flying for no other reason than to get points) but I maintain the trip was primarily for the sake of status for the kid, not for me. My first run comes later in the season, and it is a monster one...

Two lessons learned from this trip is
a) a 10 year old can cope with 14 hours of flying with direct turn for no logical purpose, just make sure the ipad is charged
b) if it is unclear if you have lounge access or not, just bluff. [MENTION=527117]remymartin[/MENTION], who is also on this trip, leads us to the lounge in LPA which isn't a Star-lounge and probably not SAS-contracted either and tells them "we are flying business so just let us in". It worked and we feasted on some small bags of crisps and cold drinks.

That was the season start. Not worthy of an episode. Now here is the first Finnair activity, in October 2014:

At this time, Finnair had started to be quite active with customer relation promotions.
In this era, I think Johanna was head of loyalty and Kenneth was head of Nordic sales. And they understood the need to activate your loyal customer base. Every now and then there was an email with invitation to this or that, and I was still reasonably untied by work and family to be able to participate in some of the events.

Nordic sales threw one hell of a crawfish party, sorry I mean a conference promoting the incoming new aircraft (A350). Some 30 Swedish plats was invited to get a brief on the matter. It started with linen cloth dining on a steam boat in the Stockholm archipelago and ended... Well, who can possibly remember how it ended? You know, on a boat with open bar, and a sales manager showing some heavy duty manager skills, drinking, singing and getting the crowd very happy. No pictures are saved from this event, so I can't pinpoint the exact time for this but it certainly is one of the most enjoyable Finnair event I've been on.

Another one was the celebration of new Finnair plus partner Accor. Instead of just announcing a new program partner, I think this was rather cleverly done. This was a joint event between Accor and Finnair, where top tier members of both programs were invited to a promotion dinner. It was held in a small venue at Östermalm, Stockholm. Travel at the participants expense of course and I have no issues with that. It was a Thursday evening, so I guess they were expecting only locals to enlist anyway. I took a train to Stockholm, allowing me to work on the way, stayed over at some no-name hotel and flew back the morning after. No hickups neither in family nor work life.

The interesting thing was that we were mixed across the programs , so not just the same old flying farts sat at the table. I was seated with a nice young couple who were Le Club Platinums. I started out the small talk with:
- Ah, you are platinum with Accor. Do you do a lot of business trips?
- Eh, no actually, it is kind of a hobby for us. We travel just to stay at different nice hotel properties. A weekend here, a weekend there. And all of a sudden we became platinum years ago and just kept on going, you know.
- Haha, I am flying Finnair as a hobby and became a Platinum years ago and just kept on going!

I think that was the clever thing with the promo. The small cost for the event was very likely offset by the benefit of not just announcing a points partnership but really making top tier members of one program interested in the other.
It was clear that this couple stayed loyal with Accor based on the tier but had never really considered getting a tier with an airline. Hearing from top tier members of a program you didn't know about, why they liked that hotel/airline was a very efficient introduction. Comparing perks and tricks of the trade across the programs made both parties interested in the other program. Up to this point I had not cared much about the hotels I stayed in and had zero loyalty and only booked by location. After this dinner I actually ended up top tier member of Le Club for awhile, but the chain wasn't the right fit for my pattern. Still, a successful outcome of this promo dinner, I think.


I found some pictures from this event by coincidence when researching another episode, so let's get into that French experience!




Confit duck is never a bad choice.




Of course excellent wine pairing, vision is getting slightly blurred by now...





And the finale - cheese tasting.
Again with excellent wine pairing, and we were also talked through this part. It easily took 30-40 minutes to get through the cheese plate, as the cheese expert / sommelier had entertaining stories of cheese history, cheese making, ins and outs of wine/cheese combinations and what not.





Now, it wouldn't have been a French evening without a singer, Edith Piaf style.



Some flying was involved in this. Morning flight BMA-MMX. I really miss the Avro RJ-100.