Hard Decisions

[kevin_standlee]

My travel time window to Japan has finally opened. I find myself with two options for the pair of business class tickets I want. I don't consider the cost to get me to Oregon or Lisa to California in anything below, because it doesn't affect the conclusion that much -- that is, any constant expenses are irrelevant, and no matter what we do, there's an expense to move one of us between the here and there. Flying coach is Not An Option.

United SFO-NRT has upgrade availability on the days I want to travel. $1550 + 60,000 miles per person. I have the miles right now and could book this ticket immediately.

I am 9K miles short on enough Alaska miles to buy two Northwest business-class tickets. Unfortunately, NW appears to only give Alaska one business class seat for their PDX-NRT route; there are no dates at all with two seats available. The agent at Alaska was very nice and found this routing that has a pair of seats, and she can get it for us if I can find the other 9K miles within 72 hours: PDX to SEA (Horizon), SEA to HNL to NRT (Northwest World Business Class).

Getting the miles into the Alaska account is the issue. If I transfer them out of Diners Club or my Marriott Rewards account, it will take 3-6 weeks to credit my Alaska account and the seats may vanish. I can buy the miles outright immediately from Alaska for $225. Mind you, I also need Alaska to credit the 569 miles I flew last night -- it's that close -- so I might end up spending $250 to buy 10K miles just to be sure. These "instant miles" would post to my account immediately, so I could use them right now and jump on the roundabout routing.

The roundabout routing is nearly free ($108 in fees and taxes, plus the $225 for the instant miles), but requires leaving PDX at 6:20 AM (thus arriving at around 5 AM), and we'd be traveling for around 21 hours before arriving at Narita around 6:20 PM local time on Tuesday the 28th. I'm sure we'd both be in terrible shape after such a trip. And due to other constraints on our travel, we wouldn't even be able to enjoy a stopover in Hawaii, even if allowed by the fare rules.

The direct flight from SFO would be around ten hours, leaves at 11:30 in the morning and arrives at 2:15 PM (next day). It is vastly more expensive, but we might not be quite as wrecked by the experience.

Comments

[daveon.livejournal.com]

This is all tricky stuff. I have enough BA miles for us to fly First to Narita, however, the problem is we might be moving to Seattle in January which makes it rather pointless to fly via London.

I could instead try and book Business on American but that involves changes. I'll need to ponder on this a little more.

[timill]

For the cheap trip, does it make sense to rendezvous the previous night in Seattle and spend some of the savings on a hotel room and meal?

[kevin-standlee.livejournal.com]

That one's tricky. Lisa won't do airports by herself -- remember, she's so unhappy about airports and "security theatre" that she was seriously researching going to Japan by ship -- so I need to be with her from the start.

Going to Seattle isn't impossible, but it would involve driving up there, and finding some place to park for three weeks, probably expensively. For Portland, she figures she can leave her vehicle at her friend Scott's. I expect we'd have to go to PDX and stay at the Airport Sheraton the night before anyway, for a flight that darn early. (Otherwise, we'd just have to be up at maybe Midnight in order to drive up from Mehama and deal with all of the other hassles.)

If only Northwest would give Alaska airlines one more seat in inventory! I wish there was some mechanism for asking Northwest if there's any way they could 'trade' a seat on the roundabout route for the direct one. I would almost think the seat on the flights to Hawaii would be worth almost as much to them as the Japan seats. As it stands, it looks like NWA is giving Alaska just barely enough inventory to be able to claim the travel partnership for marketing purposes.

It's hard to say whether saving twenty hours air travel time and getting much more decent departure/arrival times is worth $3000, though. I need Lisa's input on this before I can proceed, but she hasn't been by the phone this evening.

[redneckotaku.livejournal.com]

I wish I had the money to even think about Business. I am hoping that I can decide to go soon enough to get a Premium Economy seat from Dulles on ANA (the most expensive of the airlines to Tokyo).

[kevin-standlee.livejournal.com]

I could never afford to buy a business class seat; however, I've been accumulating frequent-flyer miles for many years, including stockpiling them in credit-card programs, anticipating using them for trips like this.

[timill]

Sometimes you can get lucky: we flew to Australia in 1999 on Gulf Air in business class for only about twice what steerage would have cost.