Merry Christmas to you all ! I hope most of you had relaxing times with your loved-ones and best of luck to the ones stranded due to the winter storms across North America. I am writing those lines as I just took off from Lyon, France to get back “home” to Amsterdam tonight after having spent a week with the family. This is the first time for me that I am flying on Christmas day and I was happy to see some small Christmas touches on board the CityHopper flight this evening !


Christmas is alive on KL CityHopper !




For once, we were quite happy to leave Lyon this year, and the reason was because this meant our official vacation was about to start: We will be spending most of the next 3 weeks in Chile together with a couple friends.

For the last few years, a couple friends of mine (he is Chilean) have asked me find them so good deals in business class to fly back to Chile from the Netherlands for Christmas. Last year, I was happy to find them a round trip for 1600 Euros only a couple months before departure during the busy travel season, and this year, they asked me a bit in advance (May) and I made them benefit from the nice AMS-SCL P fare from Lufthansa, as I managed to find some availability at their dates. The beauty of this fare is that despite being a Lufthansa fare, you could actually fly their transatlantic joint-venture partners, such as other Lufthansa group airlines, United or Air Canada, all of which have much better business class products than Lufthansa. You could also choose the easy route via Central or South American entry points (Brazil, Colombia or Panama mostly) or via the US/Canada.

At the end, I found for them a round trip via Toronto, all in Business class for barely 1400 Euros with departure a week before Xmas and return mid-january. I was actually quite proud of this finding and shared it with my girlfriend, indicating though, that this fare is on star alliance, and that we were no longer star alliance flyers (we prefer oneworld and skyteam as we have top-tier status there). But she immediately replied “Oh that’s still a good deal, why don’t we go there for new years eve !”. (That’s why I love her… because of her “spontaneity” J). So after asking our friends and spending another several hours looking for flights for us (trying to find the best compromise between schedule, availability, price, product and mileage earning), we booked a round trip on Air Canada, with the departure being just one week later than our friends and the return on the same dates.

The itinerary of this journey will be the following :

- Air Canada 787-8 business “Signature” class AMS-YYZ

- Air Canada 787-9 business “Signature” class YYZ-SCL (with hopefully a nice visit to the YYZ Signature Suite)

- Air Canada 787-9 “Signature” business class SCL-YYZ

- Air Canada 787-9 “Signature” business class YYZ-VIE

- Austrian airlines 320 business class VIE-AMS.

Trans-atlantic flights in P, LH or OS marketed, but AC operated, Trans-american flights originally booked in Z, AC marketed/operated. Cherry on the cake, since star alliance FFPs credit miles based on the operating carrier (and not the marketing carrier like skyteam or oneworld), this trip should get us quite close to being star alliance Gold on Aegean, thanks to the generous earnings for Air Canada operated flights, even in P. (In light of this, we did a short weekend in Athens early December to have at least 2 A3 segments to get lower silver thresholds since we were starting from zero with Aegean !)

All booked for about 1400 Euros on Lufthansa stock via Expedia (unfortunately the only way to book that fare at our dates; I would have preferred to book directly with the airline).

We indeed had a couple schedule changes since may 2022, and had more or less trouble to get rebooked to proper alternatives since we booked via Expedia.

In between, we will have 36 hour layover in Toronto on the outbound (was supposed to be 8 hours only but Air Canada cancelled all the YYZ-SCL Monday evening departures), and 2 and half days in Toronto on the return. We will also be flying to Patagonia (Punta Arenas, onboard LATAM 320 and 787 premium economy/business class) and Atacama desert region (LATAM 320 Premium economy).

Also, parts of North America are currently struggling with flight cancellations due to current winter storm, so we are hoping to get to our destination without too many issues. So far online check-in was successful and flight AC827 is still planned for tomorrow, Dec. 26th…

We are very excited of this trip, and also to be able to fly Air Canada business class after all those years and discover their Signature Suite in Toronto (although we read and heard reports of travelers, including our friends, being unfairly refused access to it despite meeting all eligibility criteria).

Stay tuned !