Another Year of Travel Riches and Glitches

 

As 2024 winds to a close, we’d like to enthusiastically welcome several new subscribers to our readership. We promise not to overburden your inbox, and rest assured that any links we include do not include a commission for us.

Furthermore, we don’t consider ourselves travel “experts,” even if some of our friends and family do, but we enjoy the luxury of having the time to complete a fair amount of research when planning trips. We also know some real travel experts, and learn from them.

We still learn something almost every time we travel, and we continue to make the odd mistake that keeps us from ever feeling smug about our expertise.

Just this morning, for example, we were notified through our Expert Flyer paid subscription that there was a First Class upgrade available on our March SEA-PHL flight on Alaska. For some reason, probably unused credits in our Alaska accounts, we had bought two separate tickets and this complicated matters.

When the Alaska phone agent we reached pulled a First Class upgrade for Kathy, the other two available First Class upgrades disappeared, an interesting glitch in Alaska’s less-than-stellar IT mechanism.  The friendly and diligent agent (typical of our dealings with AS reps) was aware of the problem but had to sort it out with a supervisor.

She appears to have been successful, but we’ll now think twice before buying separate tickets for any future flights. As a matter of fact, Alaska flyers traveling as couples should decide whether or not to split their itineraries, because AS tends to release upgrades one seat at a time, and an itinerary with two will be skipped over for a single traveler lower on the upgrade list. This subject has received a lot of discussion on FlyerTalk.

We've decided we'd rather fly together in Premium Class, where we're automatically seated due to status, than separately (or only one of us) in F. That's a YMMV situation (Your mileage may vary), and worth considering for couples. Flights have been generally full in 2024, and even as exalted MVP Gold 100Ks, we've been upgraded surprisingly few times. Premium Economy is quite pleasant though.

We tend our itineraries much the same way we tend our garden. We check the details regularly, not just hoping to spot a drop in a fare or a hotel rate, but even schedule changes. Yes, we’ve spotted flight changes that the airline never bothered to share with us.

We try to look at the challenges as part of the fun of travel. We admit that some are more fun than others.

Just the other day our son, about to fly home from  Barcelona to Seattle via London Heathrow after a quick work trip, was notified by British Airways that his flight the next day had been cancelled and rebooked for the following day.

He called BA and quickly learned that it was his first flight out of Barcelona that had been cancelled. The agent promptly rebooked him on a flight leaving three hours earlier, a simple solution apparently beyond the capabilities of BA's automated system. He didn’t even have to use that well known HUACA strategy: Hang up and call again.

We’ve easily managed to requalify for Alaska’s top tier again, and AS has added an interesting wrinkle to its frequent flyer program. Starting in 2025, miles flown on award flights will be counted as Elite Qualifying Miles (EQM) for status. This means our May 2025 award flight to Australia via Fiji on Fiji Airways (SFO-NAN-MEL-NAN-SFO) will add over 15,000 miles to our qualifying miles. Now that’s a true enhancement (frequent flyers have learned to dread an airline announcing an "enhancement") that will keep us in the game a little longer.

The next couple of days will find us hosting 15 at our house - children and their significant others, and our grandchildren. We’ve taken all eight of our grandchildren on their own trip to Europe over the past decade, starting with the oldest a decade ago in 2014, and the youngest this past March. The oldest is now returning to Europe on his own trip early in 2025, and we’ll be quite happy if we’ve passed the travel bug along to all of them.We may even talk a little travel during our time together.

We already have trips planned for Italy in January and Czechia and Austria in February. If we spot anything interesting in Google Flight Search or elsewhere, we’ll be sure to pass it along. In the meantime, we wish our readers and fellow travelers a joyful holiday.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!