And another year has just flown away – and you can believe this word by word. 2007 was another heavy travelling-year (the 10th in a row) with more than 200 flights, mostly crossing Germany and the European continent, but also with some very much appreciated trips to Canada and through China. Especially the last one has impressed me very much – I was there in preparation for the 2008 Olympic Games and used the time there also to discover a very charming and more than interesting country and culture. Most time there was not related to flying, so I decided not to write a trip report about that. But before you may stop reading with thoughts like “what the hell is he telling me” – this is going to be a real trip report, as it is christmas-time again. And christmas-time means a long needed period of at least 10 to 14 days completely without any business-related appointment. As usual I have to apologize in advance for my not so well trained writing skills in English – but as this is not only a great but also an international community, I hope for your understanding

To follow a long tradition I use the time between christmas and newyear´s for a trip to visit friends and colleagues which I´m hardly able to see during the year, as most of them have comparable tight schedules and are frequently travelling across Europe and their home-countries too. These trips are also a quit good opportunity to burn some miles. Due to the reason that I´m mostly flying shorthaul there are not much opportunities to use them for upgrades or free flights so I end up most time in buying domestic awards for flights which will be simply too expensive if payed with real money. Also a good deal, as I have to pay for domestic trips out of my own budget but not as exciting as flying intercontinental in premium cabins.

As a result I will find myself in a nice trip on a Lufthansa 1st Class Award to visit Istanbul, Frankfurt and San Francisco. And as there is enough time to add a long desired destination to my book – I´ll finally visit New York City. You may believe it or not – even with more than 2800 flights in the records to some famous and some really exotic destinations all around the globe I´ve never managed to visit the Big Apple. I´m excited!

This is the ininerary of this trip:

(12/24) Hamburg – Istanbul (on board of the future Star Alliance Member Turkish Airlines - unfortunately in Economy – not part of the award-ticket).

(12/25) Istanbul – Frankfurt with Lufthansa in Business

(12/25-12/26) Hilton Frankfurt

The above mentioned flights and the hotelstay in Frankfurt is covered by another tripreport, in which I am going to share a little part of my experiences by crisscrossing Europe. This is the link to this report.

(12/26) Frankfurt – JFK with Lufthansa in First Class

(12/26-12/28) Hilton New York

(12/28) JFK – San Francisco with UNITED p.s. in First Class

(12/28-12/29) Hilton San Francisco Union Square

(12/29) San Francisco – Munich with Lufthansa in First Class

(12/30) Munich – Hamburg with Lufthansa in Business

And then onward to a nice newyear´s party in my lovely hometown – but that is part of another story, not related to Flyertalk

To make this report a little more spicy, I´ll add some pictures too.

The planning

This is really a little bit complicated. Last year I´ve made an award trip with the following ininerary: BCN-FRA-PHL-BUF/ORD-SFO-FRA-HAM. As you might know there are 2 connecting flights allowed on a star-alliance intercontinental award ticket. I used BCN-BUF as the outbound and ORD-HAM as the inbound flight with ORD-SFO as a connecting flight. Not a problem at all.

This year, they changed the rules – and they did it very silent. The new rule is, that the point of return MUST be the farthest distant city of the itinerary.

My first plan was to fly: IST-FRA-ORD-LGA / JFK-SFO-MUC-HAM – same routing procedure as last year with JFK-SFO as a connecting flight. But now the point of return must be SFO – and as you can see I´d have had 3 connecting flights to get there. Not allowed. I insisted with the premium hotline at least 3 times (there were no award seats on FRA-JFK available), spoke with 2 supervisors without any success. Everytime I ran against the thick wall of this lousy new rule, which had to be followed. In the 4th call and with the 3rd supervisor in line the nice lady put me on hold to call their revenue management and asked them to open up an award seat on a nonstop FRA-JFK flight. I was not very positive as I´d checked availability for awards with the famous and very appreciated ANA-tool and through the KVS-tool. No award seats and to make things worse, all FRA-JFK/EWR flights on Dec 26th very almost fully booked in all classes (don´t know why so many people wanted to fly to New York on christmas, maybe to spend a litte extra money for after-christmas shopping due to the weak dollar, who cares – they are stealing my seat ;-) After 15 minutes of music and Lufthansa advertisments the lady finally get back and she became my litte goddess this day. She really managed to open up an award seat in first class on the LH404 flight at 5pm for me. It took me about half a second to think about this and to finalize the ticket – a no-brainer. This would also allow me to spend more time in Frankfurt with my friends and to enjoy another first class flight in the upper-deck of a Boing 747 wich I rate a little bit above the first cabin on an Airbus due to the more private atmosphere.

But that´s enough of the introduction. May the trip begin. You are kindly invited to follow me the next 15090 miles.