- Joined
- Jun 20, 2002
- Posts
- 17,757
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- Virgin
- Platinum
Well it has been a long hiatus for me and Trip Reports, 3 years to be exact and even then I didn’t finish it.
But this time I intend to finish, as it will be live as much as possible (but I have a little bit of catching up to do as we are already a couple of days into it).
Fueled by @juddles musings, but still personalised as there are other players in this report. A family with all its failings and emotions - sometimes frustrating yet glimpse of sheer exhilaration as we share moments that will become indelibly printed on the retinas in our soul. Together time. Memories.
So, onto the preamble. For a 3 week trip of this magnitude, one would expect that I’d have started booking flights 355 days out. No, that’s for people with a mountain of points and a clear direction of where they are going. After working out with family and friends we were visiting when they were all available, it was only then I was able to put the flights in place. January to be precise, 5 months before D-day. Using my TA (an AFF’er of course @Travel Guru), someone who understands my predilections for FF points and status so it had to be in status-earring fares. No Qantas this trip for us, with a family of 4, I can re-qualify Gold with VA on this trip using Family Pooling. Good timing as well, given I’m only on 220 for my member year and it finishes in August.
Then I really had a rest for months as so focused on work. The only thing we did toward our holiday was to go to the Brisbane Travel Show and organise the Disneyland tickets (4 day hopper passes, that allowed us to go between both parks) and an LA hotel. I’m not sure what I was thinking about the accommodation - getting a hotel near to Disney shouldn’t have been difficult, but I made it that way. We learn more from our mistakes than our successes and this was my first mistake in hindsight.
Easter came and went and I was meant to have done all the other planning. Nah, nothing like bringing it all together nearing the last moment - but my wife was starting to get concerned so in the true “happy wife, happy life”, I extracted my digit and put together a spreadsheet with all the items I needed. I love doing the research but there is always the issue of over-complicating and always looking for better deals. I spent nights at my laptop, searching for accommodation in Seattle and Everett, with a list of “must haves” and “like to have”, until I had narrowed them down and was happy to book.
Slowly I ticked off my list, starting with applying for new passports for me and my daughter, to learning about ESTA’s. This was eye opening for me, as the last time we went to USA (back in 2005), the I94’s were still in vogue. I did love the ability to do all my family members ESTA’s in a group, particularly when it came to paying once for all 4.
Similarly, last time I went to USA I’d used my mobile and international roaming which cost me a packet. This time, I was forewarned and forearmed, we did a little bit of research plus lucky that we had friends in USA who assisted in the search and were able to buy us the SIM and have it Fedex’ed to our LA hotel.
Another mistake I made that I won’t make again - booking codeshare international flights and organising the seating through Delta’s Manage My Trip. Why, you might ask - and a good question! When booking the flights, it had come up being cheaper on the DL codeshares than VA. Yes, I had also ensured the internal DL flights were in the correct fare buckets that earned status, but hadn’t considered the bigger picture. Therefore I had the DL booking reference and as we had internal flights, organised all the seats through Delta’s Manage My Trip without realizing the mistake I was making.
On the first flight, I’d chosen 30ABCD - not to bad for a Gold member. Then 3 days before departure day, I got an alert from AwardWallet (which I use to manage all my family travel programs) that the seating had changed to 32 BCDF. What the?? I hadn’t rung up and changed seats, especially not to much worse seats. Ringing VA, I found that by not ringing VA to organise the seating, I had unwittingly self destructed our seating. They CSA explained that the history of the booking showed that DL had released the seats yesterday. Could so get them back? No, a full flight and others had picked up the seats already. Having to tell my family that we’d lost my preferred seats wasn’t easy - well, to my wife anyway. She had wanted us to have a window and a row of 3, so we weren’t sitting next to strangers.
As we get older, indeed time goes quicker. This was no exception as before we knew it, the day was upon us. Packing was done the night before but we had been setting things aside for a couple of weeks into a pile. I had to be home early the night before so we weren’t packing the morning of our flight, as we had done previously.
But this time I intend to finish, as it will be live as much as possible (but I have a little bit of catching up to do as we are already a couple of days into it).
Fueled by @juddles musings, but still personalised as there are other players in this report. A family with all its failings and emotions - sometimes frustrating yet glimpse of sheer exhilaration as we share moments that will become indelibly printed on the retinas in our soul. Together time. Memories.
So, onto the preamble. For a 3 week trip of this magnitude, one would expect that I’d have started booking flights 355 days out. No, that’s for people with a mountain of points and a clear direction of where they are going. After working out with family and friends we were visiting when they were all available, it was only then I was able to put the flights in place. January to be precise, 5 months before D-day. Using my TA (an AFF’er of course @Travel Guru), someone who understands my predilections for FF points and status so it had to be in status-earring fares. No Qantas this trip for us, with a family of 4, I can re-qualify Gold with VA on this trip using Family Pooling. Good timing as well, given I’m only on 220 for my member year and it finishes in August.
Then I really had a rest for months as so focused on work. The only thing we did toward our holiday was to go to the Brisbane Travel Show and organise the Disneyland tickets (4 day hopper passes, that allowed us to go between both parks) and an LA hotel. I’m not sure what I was thinking about the accommodation - getting a hotel near to Disney shouldn’t have been difficult, but I made it that way. We learn more from our mistakes than our successes and this was my first mistake in hindsight.
Easter came and went and I was meant to have done all the other planning. Nah, nothing like bringing it all together nearing the last moment - but my wife was starting to get concerned so in the true “happy wife, happy life”, I extracted my digit and put together a spreadsheet with all the items I needed. I love doing the research but there is always the issue of over-complicating and always looking for better deals. I spent nights at my laptop, searching for accommodation in Seattle and Everett, with a list of “must haves” and “like to have”, until I had narrowed them down and was happy to book.
Slowly I ticked off my list, starting with applying for new passports for me and my daughter, to learning about ESTA’s. This was eye opening for me, as the last time we went to USA (back in 2005), the I94’s were still in vogue. I did love the ability to do all my family members ESTA’s in a group, particularly when it came to paying once for all 4.
Similarly, last time I went to USA I’d used my mobile and international roaming which cost me a packet. This time, I was forewarned and forearmed, we did a little bit of research plus lucky that we had friends in USA who assisted in the search and were able to buy us the SIM and have it Fedex’ed to our LA hotel.
Another mistake I made that I won’t make again - booking codeshare international flights and organising the seating through Delta’s Manage My Trip. Why, you might ask - and a good question! When booking the flights, it had come up being cheaper on the DL codeshares than VA. Yes, I had also ensured the internal DL flights were in the correct fare buckets that earned status, but hadn’t considered the bigger picture. Therefore I had the DL booking reference and as we had internal flights, organised all the seats through Delta’s Manage My Trip without realizing the mistake I was making.
On the first flight, I’d chosen 30ABCD - not to bad for a Gold member. Then 3 days before departure day, I got an alert from AwardWallet (which I use to manage all my family travel programs) that the seating had changed to 32 BCDF. What the?? I hadn’t rung up and changed seats, especially not to much worse seats. Ringing VA, I found that by not ringing VA to organise the seating, I had unwittingly self destructed our seating. They CSA explained that the history of the booking showed that DL had released the seats yesterday. Could so get them back? No, a full flight and others had picked up the seats already. Having to tell my family that we’d lost my preferred seats wasn’t easy - well, to my wife anyway. She had wanted us to have a window and a row of 3, so we weren’t sitting next to strangers.
As we get older, indeed time goes quicker. This was no exception as before we knew it, the day was upon us. Packing was done the night before but we had been setting things aside for a couple of weeks into a pile. I had to be home early the night before so we weren’t packing the morning of our flight, as we had done previously.
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