Frequent Miler on the Air - How Nick booked his baller family of 4 round the world adventure featuring Taylor Swift in Europe, a free Mediterranean cruise, tropical beaches in Mauritius, and DisneySea in Japan | Frequent Miler on the Air Ep276 | 10-11-24

Episode Date: October 11, 2024

In today's episode, we'll look at how Nick booked his baller family of 4 a round-the-world adventure featuring Taylor Swift in Europe, a free Mediterranean cruise, tropical beaches in Mauritius, and DisneySea in Japan! (01:28) - Beware of agents erroneously telling you your free night certificate is not applicable at SLH properties! (05:30) - What is this segment even about? (And how should you evaluate opportunities?) (11:42) - Amex airline fee reimbursements Learn more about airline fee reimbursements here. (19:05) - Read more about Nick's incredible trip here. (22:22) - Getting to Europe on JetBlue in Mint (business) class via Qatar Avios Read how to book JetBlue Mint via Qatar Avios here. (27:25) - Getting around Europe (35:04) - “Free” MSC cruise from Venice to Montenegro, Croatia, Greece, and Italy Read how to get free cruises through casino status matching here. (39:45) - Venice to Paris: Air France Business Class via Virgin Atlantic for 9,000 points + ~$22 each (45:19) - Big Air Canada Aeroplan award from Paris to Japan (1:01:40) - Train to Tokyo (1:10:49) - Tokyo to Hawaii to New York (1:24:45) - Amex Gold card now has a coupon for a $7 Dunkin' credit. Does it work for Baskin Robins too?

Let's get into the giant mailbag. What crazy thing did City do this week? It's time for Mattress Running the Numbers. Ready for the main event? The main event. Frequent Liler on the air starts now. Today's main event, how Nick booked his baller family of four around the world adventure featuring Taylor Swift in Europe, a free Mediterranean cruise,

tropical beaches in Mauritius and Disney sea in Japan. Yeah. Not bad for summer vacation. It worked out. Okay. Worked out. Okay. We're looking forward to you telling us all about that in today's main

event. And I have to say, this is easily the longest title we've ever had for a show, but it probably won't be the longest title we've ever had for a show. But it probably won't be the longest show we've ever recorded. So if you saw the title and you were like, oh, I don't know if I have time for this one. Hopefully it won't be the longest show we've ever. Well, I don't know about hopefully.

I just don't think it's going to be. We'll see. We do have some long ones. I know some of you out there mowing the lawn appreciate that. So we'll see what we can do for you today. But at any rate, remember, if you want to jump ahead to a specific segment or you want to return to something you can always just go to the show notes we've got the time stamps in the show notes so if you expand the description box and take a look through you can jump ahead or jump back also remember wherever you're watching or listening to this don't forget to like it give us a thumbs up leave us some

feedback leave us a review a rating etc we always love hearing from you and it helps other people discover the show too. So thank you very much for doing that. All right, let's drag out this week's Giant Mailbag. All right. Today's Giant Mail comes from Tim. Some of you might not know that Frequent Miler is not just Nick and I, but also behind the scenes, we have a full-time writer, Tim. And of course, most people know Kerry and Stephen as well, anyone who checks out the blog or our Ask Us Anything segments. Tim wrote in because he was trying to book a SLH property, small luxury hotel property, using Hilton free night certificates, which you might remember. they have a partnership,

Hilton and SLH. And one of the great things about the partnership is that Hilton lets you do things like use free night certificates or fifth night free awards, things like that. So Tim, you know, in order to use those free night certificates, you can't do it online. You have to either call or online chat. Tim chose to do online chat, which is exactly how I would do it online. You have to either call or online chat. Tim chose to do online chat, which is exactly how I would do it too. And he told us about the conversation. So the Hilton rep says, can you please give me the full name and location of the hotel? Tim answers. And then Joyce says, for the information, the free night certificate is not applicable in the SLH properties. And Tim writes, yes, it is. It's in the terms and conditions.

And to her credit, the rep comes back with, I'm sorry for the miscommunication. And then she easily booked it for him. What about miscommunication there? Miscommunication would be you communicated it incorrectly, right? But it's not that she communicated it badly. It's that she had bad information. But yeah, Tim said, and I totally agree with what he said. He said, just incredible to me how often this happens. If I didn't already know better than the rep, I'd give up thinking it wasn't possible. And we've said this so many times before that I often tell people I don't ask a representative a question that I don't already know the answer

to. And I know that sounds silly and it sounds like I'm being facetious, but in general, that's true because I know that the average rep is just not going to be right a lot of the time. And it's not anything malicious. I don't think Joyce was probably most likely Joyce wasn't just being lazy or difficult or trying to deny Tim is his award booking. It's more so just that Joyce probably wasn't familiar with it and didn't think that it was possible because she probably doesn't have free night certificates of her own. And she's probably not reading blogs about the best places to use her free night certificates. She's just clocking in

and doing her a couple of hours responding to chats and clocking back out. So it is wild though how often I imagine people who do not live and breathe this stuff get turned down on something like that and then just think it's right.

Yeah, I'm sure it happens all the time. And, you know, it's good that people are listening to shows like this one and reading blogs like ours, right? So, you know, hopefully that won't happen to you or you'll be around it as easily as Tim did. Well, yeah, exactly. If it does, then, you know, you know that you just need a little bit of pushback. And, you know, I was actually kind of surprised that in this case, it seems like very quickly, the representative came back and was like, oh, yeah, you're right. It is bookable. Because I think a lot of times you'll get a rep that'll just dig in and be like, nope, can't be done.

And I always tell people in that situation, don't dig in your heels and argue back and forth and send them links to the terms and conditions. Just hang up and try again, because the next person will probably understand or maybe be more receptive to hearing that it should be able to be done. So I don't usually spend a lot of time arguing with a rep who thinks that something can't be done. Rather, I'll just try again and always assume that like if Tim had success with this, then, you know, you're going to to eventually if you get the right representative, because obviously it can be done. So somebody tells, you know, obviously that that's's not correct so just keep trying until you get it done yep okay that's that i think that brings us to mattress running the numbers so for this week's mattress running the numbers i think we're going to explain what mattress running the numbers is

what does that even mean the reason we're doing it this way instead of doing a normal mattress running the numbers segment is that I'm on vacation right now. So what we did is we went back in time and recorded this before I left for vacation. And so we didn't have a current deal to talk about, but what mattress running the numbers, this segment is all about is what we do is we take a current deal. Usually the idea started with hotel deals where, where the idea is there's a hotel promotion, maybe they're offering a free night certificate after two paid stays, for example. And so we would analyze that and say, oh, well, is it worth finding two cheap nights to spend at a hotel just to check in and get that free night. I mean,

just to get the free night. You don't want those two nights at all. You just have to check in in order to earn that free night certificate. And so we analyze, is it worth it? You know, we'll say things like, well, suppose you could find each of those nights, each of the two nights available for $80. So in total, it's going to cost you 160. How much is the free night certificate worth? And then we'll talk about that. So when you check into a hotel just for the purpose of earning rewards like that, it's called mattress running.

And that's why we call the segment mattress running the numbers. Yeah. And it's important to look at it by saying, okay, well, you know, how much would I be willing to spend in order to get this thing? Just like Greg analyzed right there. Is it worth spending $160 to get this free night certificate? But then how do you determine, okay, well, how do you determine that? How do you decide that? Yeah, this hotel free night certificate is worth $160 or whatever. I mean, we're using that as an example, but there's lots of other examples for sure. So, you know, I think people will often look at it like this, like say, oh, I'm going to use that free night certificate to stay at this luxury hotel that would have cost $450. So it's okay to spend $450 for the two nights in order to earn that free night. Well, and the answer is no, that it's not okay because what you're then doing is you're still spending $450 for that luxury hotel stay, but you're actually, it's taking you more work.

You're having to check into a hotel twice, get a free night certificate, which maybe it'll work exactly as you hope, but best case is then you're able to stay in that hotel that would have cost you $450. You use the free night certificate instead, but that free night certificate, again, still costs you $450. And now you're not even earning rewards for the stay. So that would be a terrible deal. So instead, I like to think of it as like, to think logically, how much would you be willing to pay for, in this example, a free night certificate coupon? Basically, a coupon that you could later redeem with Marriott or Hilton or whoever it is and say, here, I have this free night.

And what you're willing to pay should always be significantly less than what you would otherwise pay for your stay. Because otherwise, why do it? What you want is big savings. And I'm talking about like, in my opinion, I think you'd normally want to be looking at least 50% savings over what you would otherwise spend. Otherwise, it's just usually not going to be worth it. Yeah, exactly. You want to save a significant amount because there's a lot of different risks that come with it, right? What if something doesn't track correctly? Or what if plans change and then you can't use the free night certificate the way you intended? It's going to expire eventually. Are you going to find another

good use? You're taking on risk by essentially prepaying for this free night certificate coupon in this example. And so the trade-off for that, taking on that risk should be a very large savings, a very significant savings. So that's why we look at it and say, okay, well, how much would I be willing to pay? And whatever that amount is should be significantly less than the going rate or the going cost of that. Whether we're talking about free night certificates or extra points or rental car free days, it doesn't really matter. It's all kind of the same thing. How much would I be willing to pay for that? We recently talked about a car rental situation where you needed like two rentals in order to get a free one day rental. And that's another situation, very similar, where I say, okay, well,

how much would I be willing to pay for that one, quote unquote, free day, which is no longer free if I'm paying for it, keep in mind, right? So how much would I be willing to pay? And maybe I'd say, well, if I could rent a car, if I could pay $40, great, because then I'd get a free day that I could use on a one-way rental that would ordinarily cost more than $100. So if I can find two $20 rentals, then awesome, I'll pay that. But if I'm going to end up spending $100 with my two qualifying rentals to earn a free day, well, that's not enough savings over what I'm going to pay for that day later on. So I wouldn't bother with something like that.

So that's what we do in mattress running the numbers. We take a look and say, okay, well, how much is this worth? And how much should you consider spending in order to get it yep yep so good so i think that should give uh everyone a glimpse into how to go about doing you know figuring out for themselves when you see a when you see a deal that that sounds good and maybe is worth going after uh again for the you, basically paying for stuff in order to earn rewards that you think will be more rewarding than what you're spending should give you a framework to do that, to do that. And I think, yep, very good. So stay tuned for our next mattress running the numbers where we'll find some sort of a deal. If Greg is back from vacation or maybe we'll go back in time again. We'll see. All right. Next up is points of view.

Yeah. So I have just one little story about how I used my Amex airline fee credits. So if you remember Amex Platinum cards, they each come with $200 annual airline fee reimbursement. And it's based on what airline you pick as your favorite airline with American Express. And it's supposed to cover things like the cost of checked bags with that airline or the cost to enter that airline's club lounge, things like that. But we have a whole post on what actually works, because a lot more things get paid back than what are officially allowed. And at least at the time I did it, and this could change anytime, so check out our post, which we'll have a link to in our show notes. At the time I did this, Delta, if you pick Delta as your preferred airline and you buy airfare with a combination of either Delta

gift card or flight credits from previous, let's say, canceled flights, then as long as the total cost is something like less than $250 of the part that gets put on your credit card, it looks like a fee to Amex and they will reimburse it up to the $200 allowed by your credit card. So in my family, I've got quite a few platinum cards right now. And so here's what I did. Here's the story. I had an existing travel credit with Delta and I used that existing travel credit plus $209 to buy a ticket in the future doesn't even matter what that is because all right i didn't have any plans to actually fly that okay okay um i then immediately so wait wait were you immediately anything so you got that 200 you got 200 back right, right? Yeah. So, well, I mean, not yet, but I was sure that it would happen. So

I used my platinum card number one. So these are actually, these cards are between my wife and I, but I'm going to just number them for, to make this story easy. So platinum card number one, I spent $209 buying a ticket using a combination. It was like a more than $209 ticket because I used a combination of existing travel credit and my Amex card. So $209 went on that first one. Then I immediately changed, I just clicked change this ticket.

And I found, I was searching for a flight that costs $200 more than the previous one I just booked. And I found one that was searching for a flight that costs $200 more than the previous one I just booked. And I found one that was $204 more. So I paid with Platinum Card number two for the change. And again- There's no change fee to be clear with Delta. That was just the fare difference. The fare difference.

That's exactly, there's no change fee. Okay. Then I immediately clicked, change the flight and use platinum number three. Now that one, I had already used $15 of airline fee credits on. So I was looking for $185 change, like a flight that costs $185 more than the previous one, I found the one that was almost exactly spot on. And I booked that. And I waited a couple days. So I still, I only have one flight now on Delta, right? Because I just kept changing the first one. Waited a few days and then I canceled the ticket and got back Delta credit for the full amount. Now, the reason I waited two days instead of canceling the whole thing the same day is if I cancel the same day, Delta would try to put

the charge back on the original form of payment. And given that it was spread out over three cards, I'm not really sure what would have happened, but I didn't want the charge going back to the original form of payment because then Amex wouldn't reimburse me. So I waited past the, you know, you have up until something like midnight the next day with Delta to cancel and get it back to the original form of payment. So I waited past that, canceled and got my, and now I have Delta credits wait and then um you know in a few days after that uh mx credited all three of those uh those charges so you have about six hundred dollars a little more than six hundred dollars in delta flight credit and in one single flight credit and you got reimbursed for six hundred dollars exactly yes so. So that's a slick little move there,

a slick little frequent miler move in order to use, you know, people often talk about having to jump through hoops in order to trigger these credits, and the hoops are pretty low to the ground. Yeah, I mean, you know, it's not as easy as like with United where you could just charge to your, what do they call it, United Travel Bank? Travel Bank, Travel Bank.

Yeah, right. Which is sort of like a United gift card that expires in five years. So you're banking up credit that you have five years to use. One of the nice things, by the way, about the United Travel Bank, I found, and I think this is a United Travel Bank thing,

is that when I booked flights with it, I ended up getting priority boarding by booking with United Travel Bank Credit. I board sooner. So yeah, just an interesting little side benefit that seems to come with using Travel Bank Credit. That's a cool tip right there. Yeah. So because I don't have a United Credit card or any elite status.

So I always expect to be in whatever the last boarding group is, but it doesn't seem to be the case. Anyway, so that's all good. That's great. The one safety tip I want to add to it is make sure that you pick your airline. If you're going to try to do this type of a thing, you're going to switch your airline to Delta or select Delta as your airline or whichever airline it's going to be. Select your airline and wait at least until the next calendar day to try to use your credits. I know with United, and so I don't know which other airlines this is going to be true with,

but it's a good safety tip nonetheless. I know with United, if you make the charge the same day that you select United as your airline, it typically does not end up reimbursing correctly. And it happened to me before, and I've seen reports from readers numerous times now, specifically with United. But I, again, imagine it could happen with other airlines, too. It just doesn't take the change or the selection that same day. So wait until the next calendar day before you try and use it. So don't wait until December 31st to choose your airline because somebody I know made that mistake once, too.

That's a good safety tip. I would not have guessed that to be true. Yeah, I would have guessed that it works right away, but it is not the case with United anyway. So although I did, I will say I did select spirit and use points. I think maybe the same calendar day and got my, my 35% rebate with a business platinum card. But anyway, all that out of the way, I would just recommend selecting at least the day before that's points of view.

I think that brings us to this week's main event. Main event time. How Nick booked his baller family of four round-the-world adventure featuring Taylor Swift in Europe, a free Mediterranean cruise, tropical beaches in Mauritius, and Disney Sea in Japan. And that's all the time we have for today. Yeah, that's going to fill up some time here anyway to discuss and explain. But yeah, it was a fun trip. So we had long kind of been planning to do this, of course, obviously, since there were a lot of moving parts.

But part of the motivation for this was a desire to try to do some amount of homeschooling and not full-time, but our goal long-term was to be able to take the kids out of school part-time, like one quarter a year and homeschool by traveling and teaching things while we travel. So this was a bit of a trial run to see, all right, well, if we bring some schoolwork, they're not in school right now, but if we bring some schoolwork and we try to do some schoolwork and travel and do this stuff. Can we do it? And I'm not sure that we answered that in the affirmative, but that was part of the motivation behind taking a really long trip was, okay, let's keep things moving for a while and see if I can get my work done and we can do homeschooling with the kids and my wife can get done the things she needs to get done and we can still enjoy this travel thing too. So that's part of the reason.

It wasn't just that I have these miles and points and wanted a crazy trip. It was kind of a bit of a test run. So that's what motivated this to begin with. Although if we really back up to the very beginning, we ended up with a cruise booking in Europe and the Taylor Swift tickets, and we'll come back to those in a second. But that meant that I needed to be able to get to Europe. And I had so I booked a cruise departing Venice in August, and I found Taylor Swift tickets. Actually, it was worth mentioning that was a reader tip. So way back when sometime last year, we had a show and I made an offhanded comment about how crazy expensive Taylor Swift tickets are and how much my wife would love to see Taylor Swift, but I'm not spending the

$1,000 a ticket or whatever it was in the US. Now it's even more, I think, for the final shows. And a couple of readers reached out after that episode and said, hey, have you looked at the shows overseas? Because some of these and those are more reasonably priced. And so I got looking around and I found that Warsaw, Poland was much less than all the other shows in Europe. And so I said, oh, well, that's kind of interesting. And so I was intrigued immediately. And then I realized, oh, well, StubHub has probably the best deal on these. And oh, I got all this Capital One shopping cash back because there had been lots of great Capital One shopping deals that we've written about over time. It's, of course, a public shopping portal. Anybody can use it. You don't have to have a Capital One card. And so I'd earned a bunch of Capital One shopping cash back, and that can only be redeemed for gift cards. Again, we're not talking about if you're a Capital One cardholder and you get deals in your account. That's different. Those are statement credits. This

is the shopping portal, like Rakuten or TopCashback or whatever else. You can't get cash out of their shopping portal. You can only get gift cards, and StubHub is one of the options. So I said, oh, well, the tickets are reasonable. I can use these StubHub gift cards from Capital One Shopping. And the show in Warsaw was a couple of days before this cruise that we were looking to book. So that kind of fell into place a couple of days before the next piece of the story. So those two things happened and I jumped on them. So I booked a cruise and we'll come back to the cruise and I bought the Taylor Swift tickets. So then I was like, okay, I got to keep my eyes out now for the right deal to get to Europe. Then I started the story that way because three days later, we wrote about a fantastic deal to get to Europe on JetBlue

in mint class, their business class, flatbed seats using Qatar Avios. So you can book JetBlue and Mint Class, their business class, flatbed seats, using Qatar Avios. So you can book JetBlue with Qatar Avios. The day we reported this, we knew that this wasn't going to last. But at that time, for a short snippet, you could have booked JetBlue Mint Class to Europe for 38,750 Avios one way, which we knew was a slamming deal that was not going to last forever. And we reported it that way and said slamming deal that was not going to last forever. And we reported it that way and said, can't imagine this is going to last forever. So jump on it if you want to book one of these routes, because there was a wide open availability, tons of seats on tons of flights at an incredible price. So did you book anything there?

I remember I tried to jump on it and I can't remember what got in my way, but I didn't jump on it in time. Yeah. Well, and that was the thing he says in time, because I think it was hours really that it lasted. It wasn't even a full day. I don't think that that lasted, but right away I jumped on it and booked seats for my family of four to fly from Boston to Dublin. Now the concert was Warsaw, and the cruise was leaving from Venice. So why Dublin? Well, just because I knew that 38,750 avios a person and four seats in flatbed business class, that combination during summer travel period was just an opportunity that wasn't going to last and a deal that couldn't be beat. And I knew that flights around Europe are usually pretty cheap. So I jumped on it and booked that even though we had no intention to go to

Dublin. But I figured that'll at least get us across the pond in a flatbed seat overnight. So everybody can hopefully get a few hours of sleep, which did work out. My sister decided later to join us. And so I wanted another seat. But of course, we'd written about that. And that deal died very quickly. And lots of people booked award seats. So there were no more award seats available on that flight. So I booked her a ticket separately with American Airlines miles flying American Airlines, knowing that American offers free changes and cancellations. So that was a bit of a placeholder where I said, OK, I'm going to book her on American

Airlines. And then if and when a seat opens up on our JetBlue flight, I can cancel her American flight, get my American miles back and still book her a seat in JetBlue. And that's exactly what happened. So I ended up booking her using Qatar Avios, but I paid full price for her. I think it's 74, 78,000 Avios one way now. So it's not nearly the deal that I got on the first four tickets, but that worked out okay. So that got us to Europe. And that was a good start, but we didn't want to stay there. It got you party of five, right? Party of five, yes.

In business class. In business class, right. During the summer. I mean, July 26th. So we're talking peak summer travel period, which that was, again, part of the reason I jumped on it because I knew that if I kept my eyes open, I would find a way to get to Europe, but I didn't know when or how, or where there obviously weren't tons of award options available the day that I booked the cruise and bought the concert tickets. So when I saw this, I knew I had to jump on it.

So what'd you think? I loved when I did Mint overseas. I thought it was really good. What did you think about it? I would love it more if I weren't traveling with kids. With kids, it's a little bit of a pain because of the way their seating arrangement is. It's like a diagonal sort of a seating arrangement where you're not, you can't see each other. And so, you know, when they needed help to get up or select something on their in-flight entertainment or whatever, and the seatbelt signs on, it was kind of a pain. I mean, the crew is nice and they were good about it, but I don't prefer that type of a seating layout traveling with the kids. Traveling not with the kids. I love it. So that's a good safety. Yeah. I mean, that's a good tip because like

the thing that some of us really value that the seats are very, very private. You have lots of room is actually kind of a downside when you're with young kids. Yeah, it is. It is. And that's something I do think about. Somebody asked about that recently. And something I do think about when I book awards is what does the seating layout look like? And yeah, I'm looking for the opposite of what people that are traveling without kids are usually looking for. So, yep.

But it was nice. Don't get me wrong. It was good. Service was very good. So, we certainly weren't disappointed. It's a little. So the last couple of trips we've taken to Europe, we've flown on an A321. We flew with Aer Lingus last summer also on their A321, which is a little odd getting

on a flight to Europe that only has one aisle. Yeah. So for those that don't know, this is not one of those typical wide body jets that have lots of seats across. In business class, they only have a single aisle down the middle and one seat on each side. Yeah. So it feels a little smaller than what you are accustomed to, probably, if you are accustomed to flying up front anyway. Again, it wasn't bad, and I thought the seat was fine, but worth knowing, I guess, if you're not familiar with that.

All right. So that got us to Europe, but we weren't intending to visit Ireland on this trip. I didn't know when I booked it exactly what we were going to do, but over time it became clear what we should do. My kids do an educational app called ABC Mouse sometimes, and there's a unit on Stirling Castle in Scotland, which I had never heard of, but the kids wanted to watch that same unit over and over and over and over again. Anybody with kids knows what I'm talking about there. And so they constantly would ask us, can we visit Sterling Castle? And for a while we were like, maybe someday, but then they kept asking and we were like, maybe if we have a chance, we should do

this because they're excited about it and they're learning about something. And so we decided we were going to go to Scotland and go to Stirling Castle. And because I booked the flight to Europe a week before the Taylor Swift concert, we had a week to play with. We had some free time. So we flew next from Dublin to Scotland. That was just a cheap Ryanair flight. There were some options on Aer Lingus using Avios, but only usingolingus Avios. And the only one that was available, actually, by the time I got around to booking this was not at an ideal time. And flights were so cheap that it really wasn't even worth using Avios. So I booked that.

Was it cheap even after accounting for all the luggage you had to have for this multi-week trip? Yeah, which is a good point. We did have more luggage than most frequent flyers do. I mean, we always have a checked bag, but we have to carry extra stuff with us. And so, yeah, we always have too much. And of course, Ryanair charges you for a full size carry on, not just for in fact, it's more expensive, I think, for the carry on than it is for the checked bag. So so that's a little bit of a pain. But yes, it still was for five of us. It was $367 to fly from Dublin to Edinburgh.

So yeah, yeah, that's cheap. Yeah. I mean, 60 something dollars each, $70 each, something like $70 each. But actually I used a Chase Ritz Carlton card and paid with that card so that I could secure a message after the fact and say, Hey, listen, $300 of this was fees for baggage and seat selection and blah, blah, blah, and get that reimbursed. So yeah, great. 67 net after that, although creative accounting there, cause obviously I paid the annual fee, but, but you know what I'm saying? So, uh, so that was cheap and easy and simple and yes, we survived Ryanair. No big deal.

I know some people are, some people don't, don't, don't want to think about flying Ryanair, but I mean, it's a plane like any other. It's not particularly comfortable, but for the hour-long flight that it is from Dublin to Edinburgh, it doesn't really matter. And I'm just guessing, but I would think that is a big perk over flying JetBlue Mint, which is that you're a little bit closer to your children when you're flying Ryanair. True, true. We were a little bit closer. Yes, that is very true. Yes. And we had lounge access.

That was kind of fun, even though we were flying Ryanair because we had priority pass. So there was a priority pass lounge in the Dublin airport. So that was kind of fun to still have lounge access. But anyway, so flew to Edinburgh, did some stuff in Scotland, saw Sterling Castle. The kids enjoyed that. And then next up, we flew from worse or rather from Edinburgh. We had to get to Warsaw because the Taylor Swift concert was in Warsaw. And so for that leg, man, flights were outrageously expensive, probably because she was doing three nights of shows in Warsaw. So it shouldn't be a surprise that they were outrageously expensive, but they were. So so the major carriers weren't a good option. There were not award seats, especially not,

there were five of us at that point. So certainly not five seats on anything that had anything available. So we, again, ended up booking cheap Ryanair flights. And so there was a cheap Ryanair flight from Edinburgh to Warsaw, not the main Warsaw airport, though, a smaller Warsaw airport further outside of the city center. Anybody who's ever flown Ryanair won't be surprised by that idea. Ryanair often flies to smaller airports that are further from the city center. And so that's worth knowing because I made the mistake one time of booking an airport hotel near the Oslo airport because I was flying Ryan air to Oslo and I figured, oh, great, we'll have a hotel right near the airport. Except I didn't realize that the airport that they fly to in Oslo is not the main Oslo or at least at the time

anyway, more than 10 years ago. But it was a 45 minute hour long train ride, something like that away from the main airport. So love how low-cost carriers rename towns that are way outside of the main cities and call them whatever that city name is. Right, right. They have a tendency to do that. So watch out for that. So I almost booked that flight,

but I read reviews of the airport that were not particularly favorable. And the main complaint that I saw over and over again were people saying that they had to stand outside on the tarmac waiting to get into the arrivals hall for passport control. And that didn't seem realistic that people complained about being hot and in the sun and no access to restrooms. And we're traveling with young kids and my sister is pregnant. So it just didn't seem like a good option for us. So instead, I booked us. I looked at other airports.

And I used flightconnections.com. That's a tool we use all the time. I used flightconnections.com to see where I could fly nonstop out of Edinburgh to see, can I get close to Warsaw? Is there another place? And so there was a city called Poznan, I think. I'd never heard of it. But Ryanair flies from Edinburgh to Poznan, or Poznan, I think. I'd never heard of it. But Ryanair flies from Edinburgh to

Poznan, Poland, rather. And that's not too terribly far away from Warsaw. It would have been a couple hours on a train, two, three hours, four hours, I think, maybe on the train, or a less than one hour flight on lot Polish from Warsaw. And while that didn't have fantastic reviews either, there was nobody complaining about standing around outside waiting for passport control. And as it turned out, it was totally fine flying into Poznań. So we flew there and then I booked a cheap lot Polish flight using my Chase Ultimate Rewards points, using my wife's Sapphire Reserve so we can get one and a half cents per point. So we booked lot Polish to fly from Poznan to Warsaw. So I added an extra flight in

there and more than we needed. And we ended up with a long travel day spent at the airport, but that was good because I got caught up on some work and the kids got caught up on some school work. So that was a okay. And those flights were easy and painless. And then my wife and my sister attended the Taylor Swift concert in Warsaw, which was a lot of fun. They had a great time. So they were pretty excited about it, as was everybody else. The hotel was, I think, all people going to Taylor Swift concerts. So that was fun. The hotel we stayed in played nothing but Taylor Swift music 24 hours a day for the entire three nights stay.

And when I say 24 hours a day, I mean it because I was up late at the bar working until like one o'clock in the morning. And it was all Taylor Swift music then. And we got to breakfast in the morning and it was all Taylor Swift music all day long. Right, right. It amazes me how her fame just seems to be growing and growing and growing. Like, you know, 10 years ago, she was a superstar. I'm not sure I have my dates right, but it seems like quite a long time ago. Yes. And but now it just seems like next level, you know. It really did. It really did. And the hotel really leaned into that, which which was fine. I mean, I'm not a big Swifty personally.

I mean, I like her music just fine, but I'm not like I'm not building friendship bracelets or making friendship or whatever the things are. I don't know all the terms and whatnot. Make one for me. Well, I mean, I did help make them in the hotel because they had a free station to make friendship bracelets. It was kind of fun. But you didn't make one for me? You know, yes, I did.

It's in the mail. But yeah, so it was a fun atmosphere anyway. And the city was full of energy. So that was cool. And then from Warsaw, next up was Venice because I had a free MSC cruise booked departing Venice. So the free MSC cruise was courtesy of the Atlantic City status matching. There's a way to start with the Wyndham earner business card and you get Wyndham diamond status. And then that matches online to Caesar's diamond status. So you can do that part online and have Caesar's diamond. And then that matches online to Caesar's diamond status. So you can do that

part online and have Caesar's diamond. And then in Atlantic City, you can match your Caesar's diamond to Hard Rock. Their icon status, I guess, is what it's called these days. And then from Hard Rock icon, you can go to the Ocean Casino Resort and match to Ocean Prime. And then with Ocean Prime, you get a free MSC cruise. Now I say free and there's quotation marks around the word free because you do have to pay a deposit. And actually, unfortunately, they've changed things. And since September 1st of 2024, they now additionally charge a $1,400 surcharge if you book an international cruise, something that's not departing the United States. So that's a huge bummer because now it's much more expensive to book this type of cruise. But when we booked it, all we had to do

is pay the $400 deposit. The $400 deposit that you get back is an onboard credit. And I've written on the blog extensively about the fact that a lot of these cruise lines offer an onboard credit, and that's super easy to cash out. All you got to do is go to the casino toss your cruise card in the slot machine and load 400 to the slot machine charging it to your room account and then you can spin it two or three times and hit cash out and go up to the cage and get cash and that's all she wrote well that's all she wrote so uh very very easy to do that and uh the downside i guess in a european cruise is you're getting Euro instead of getting US dollars. But you're in Europe, so you'd probably be able to spend them somewhere. So anyway, so I booked this free cruise that cost us the 400 that we got back as onboard credit and cashed out exactly as I just explained.

And so that cruise departed from Venice and it went to Kotor, Montenegro, went to Dubrovnik, Croatia, Corfu in Greece, Zakynthos in Greece, Bari, Italy, and back to Venice. So we spent a week kind of cruising around the Adriatic there and that was awesome. Kotor Montenegro especially was incredibly scenic. It was beautiful. We have another quote unquote free cruise booked next summer that also stops in Kotor and spends a full day cruising around the Bay of Kotor. And I can't wait because that was so beautiful. I can't wait to cruise again. Yeah. So I can't wait to, to visit there as well. That's, that sounds amazing. Yeah. Yeah. So that was terrific. I mean, in the cruise itself,

MSC has a reputation from being a cheaper cruise line. And so kind of cutting corners, I guess, and being lower end in the cruise echelon. And in some ways, that reputation fits or is deserved because it's not as fancy, certainly, as some other cruise lines. On the flip side, what I really like about the MSC European cruises is that almost all of them have long full day port stops almost every day because everything is close together in Europe. So you don't have very many sea days. It's not like cruising from New York where you get two days before you get to the Caribbean. Every day you can be in a new place. And so the amount of time we actually spend on the ship is pretty limited. We sleep on the ship, we have breakfast on the ship, and when we get back on, we eat something and go to bed, basically. So, I like it because it's not a big focus.

It's not, if you're into cruising for the sake of cruising, MSC might not be right for you. But if you just like visiting European cities, I mean, it's a great way to see five or six different European cities over the course of a week without having to pack up your stuff and move. So, that was pretty fantastic. Almost have me convinced on that. Yeah, I mean, it's it is it's a nice way to travel around Europe and see see those different places, because the truth is, we probably wouldn't have even I mean, I had never heard of Couture Montenegro, I would be honest. So it wasn't anywhere near my radar.

It's certainly not a place that I would have been planning a trip anytime soon. Now I would. There's a Hyatt Regency there. It's a good value on points. I mean, I totally would consider a trip there, and I never would have otherwise. And we've been to a number of places like that now on our European cruises, smaller European cities where I'm like, oh, I wouldn't have thought to plan a trip there, but maybe I should in the future.

And the nice thing with miles and points is that, whereas it might be really expensive to fly to Kotor, I don't really know. I assume it's more expensive than it is to fly to Rome or Paris if you're paying cash. But with miles, it's often, you know, the price is the same wherever you're going in Europe. And so that makes it much easier to return to places like that. So that was fun. And wasn't it though that wasn't the last stop so from and and just you know for most people that would be like that's a huge you know bucket list uh once in a decade type of trip but you're not you're not even halfway done with your distance wise with your trip right right well yeah. Well, yeah. Distance or time, I guess at that point, because it was five and a half ish weeks and this is only a couple of weeks

in. Yeah. And when we first booked it, that's all that we originally had booked. We had that cruise and the Taylor Swift show. And so the next thing I booked after booking the cruise and buying the Taylor Swift tickets was the JetBlue flight with the Qatar Avios. And those little dots that I filled into Edinburgh and to Warsaw, that was later on. I made all those bookings significantly later on. And I didn't have a way home booked when we first got that part done. I didn't know when we were going home or how we were going to get home, but I figured I'll find a way eventually where there's a will, there's a way. And when it comes to booking multiple people and awards, you kind of have

to look at it that way because it's unlikely you're going to find the four or five seats that I needed all at once on the same day where I'm going to put all the pieces together. So it was kind of open-ended. And we said, well, the kids are out of school. We've got the time. We talked about the whole homeschool trial run type of a situation. And so then we started looking at other options from Venice. And we originally booked a big aeroplane award, and we planned on ending up in Africa. And then we changed our minds on that, mostly because my son gets car sick very easily. And we had a bunch of driving planned on that. And so we switched destinations and ended up doing some driving and he got carsick. So I'm not sure that we really avoided that problem. But the Big Air Canada award that we booked started in Paris. So we had to get

from Venice to Paris. And so looking around at award search tools, I stumbled on the fact that Air France had business class from Venice to Paris bookable via Virgin Atlantic. Now, intra-European business class, if you've never flown intra-European business class, it's not special. It's usually just a blocked middle seats, the regular economy class seats. There's nothing different about them except for the fact that they block the middle seats. So it usually wouldn't be worth spending more money or more points on that, in my opinion, over booking economy, especially for a flight that's only an hour or two. In this case, I think it was less than two hours. But there were no awards available in economy class through anybody but Air France Flying Blue, and the economy seats were 31,000 miles each booked via Air France, and that wasn't appealing.

But booking via Virgin Atlantic, we could book business class on Air France for 9,000 points per person plus about $22 in cash. So that was a no-brainer. That's a great deal. And you do get better service, some snacks and things that you wouldn't necessarily get an economy so it's it is a you know yeah the seats aren't nicer but it's a slightly nicer experience that's true flying that's like that um what blew me away about this in this case is finding out how close venice and par. Like mentally, they're much further away than, I think to get that award,

they have to be under 650 miles or something like that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, wow. It is, it's less. I looked it up after you made mention of that. And yes, it was less than the 650 miles. I can't remember exactly the distance. So yeah, it's not terribly far from Venice to Paris.

Too far to make it drivable in our situation, but not that far. So yeah, it was the short distance span. And that's why it's so cheap with Virgin Atlantic points, because their flights are based on origin and destination distance, at least generally speaking. So yeah, 9,000 points seemed like a great deal. And you're right, we got a decent meal in flight, we had lounge access, free checked bags. So there are some benefits to flying business class, you're right, in fairness. So we flew Venice to Paris on that, and that set us up for a big Air Canada Aeroplan award. So the Air Canada Aeroplan award is kind

of complex. So I'll just explain the legs quickly first and then talk another minute or two about this. Air Canada Aeroplan has a both distance and zone-based award chart. And so what that means is they take a look first at the two zones you're flying between from your origin to your destination and then at the total distance from your origin to destination. And that determines the price. And so we decided we wanted to go to Asia after Europe. We wanted the kids to experience a big Asian city. And we live in the countryside. When I say we live in the countryside, probably most people don't picture it as countryside as it really is. I often joke that there's more cows than people where we live, and people think that it's a joke, but it's really

not a joke. There are more cows in our town probably than people. It's just a very, very small rural town. I live in a rural spot. So, we're used to having lots of space and not having a lot of people around. And so, we've really kind of wanted to expose the kids to the total opposite of that. I mean, we've been in New York City and things like that before. So, it's not like they have no experience with a big city, but Shibuya Crossing Tokyo, where you get all those people, a couple thousand people, there's more people than live in our town crossing that intersection when the light changes. At any given moment. Yeah. And that's not an exaggeration.

I mean, look it up. I think there's like 2000 people crossing that intersection. That's more than the population of our town. So, yeah. So we wanted them to get that experience. And so we decided to go to Asia. And so what we booked with Air Canada Aeroplan was an Atlantic zone, which that includes Europe and Africa, to Pacific zone, which includes basically all of Asia and Oceania

and all the rest of that. So this itinerary included Paris to Mauritius, which if you're not familiar with Mauritius, it's an island east of Madagascar, technically part of Africa, but it's in the Indian Ocean. And interesting mix there because you've got cultural influences from the Indian subcontinent and from Africa and from Europe because I think it was French colony at some point, I think. So there's an interesting mix there and the food and everything else. But anyway, Paris- It is a long, long way from Paris. I mean, unless my mental map, just like the Venice to Paris thing is wrong, but my mental map of where Mauritius is, it's like off the eastern, sort of almost southeastern coast of the African continent. So you have to cross diagonally, if my mental map is right, across almost the whole African continent, which is enormous.

It's big, yeah. Yes, yeah. I think it was a nine and a half hour flight, something like that. So pretty far, yeah. I mean, think like New York to Honolulu kind of a distance. Yeah. So it is a long, long flight. So it was Paris to Mauritius and then Mauritius to Kuala Lumpur, Kuala Lumpur to Singapore,

Singapore to Osaka, Japan. And then that award actually also included one more segment from Osaka to Guam. And I'll come back to that in a second. So all of that was in business class, except that last segment from Osaka to Guam that we didn't end up flying. That would have been an economy. But all the rest of it was in business class. And Air Canada Aeroplan allows you to add a stopover for 5,000 miles. So we had a stopover in Mauritius for five days.

That cost an additional 5,000 miles. So this whole ticket cost 115,000 miles in business class one way. And in addition to the five-day stopover in Mauritius, I booked those segments so that we would have an eight or nine-hour layover in Kuala Lumpur during the daytime, hoping originally that we would do something in Kuala Lumpur. And then a 16 and a half hour overnight layover in Singapore. And again, the reason for those long layovers is because if it's less than 24 hours, if that you're in that city, then it's just a layover. You don't need to pay any additional miles and you can only pay additional miles for one stopover. So once we

had the stopover in Mauritius, I couldn't stay more than 24 hours anywhere else, but you can stay up to 24 hours. So again, eight or nine hour layover in Kuala Lumpur, 16 and a half hour layover in Singapore. And that I built in specifically so that I could go and get a delicious treat at a food stand in a hawker center there that I wanted. And so I planned that to make sure that I would be there when they opened in the morning, because I know that's when your best shot of getting the J2 crispy curry puff is. So I wanted to be there in the morning when they opened up. And so we planned that for the 16 and a half hours in Singapore. And then from Singapore to Osaka and in Osaka, we had a 23 hour and 55 minute layover before the last leg on to Guam. And that was intentional as well,

because we ultimately decided that we were going to stay in Japan. And so I wanted to have a long layover there to make sure that I would be able to check my bag to pick up in Osaka. That they weren't going to try to check it through to Guam. So all of those things were helpful to have. And that was pretty cool. Because we flew from Paris to Mauritius on Air Mauritius. Super easy to find. Four or more seats in business class on almost all of the Air Mauritius flights. I think that's largely because the only ways to book Air Mauritius with miles, to my knowledge, are Air France Flying Blue and Air Canada Aeroplan. And I don't know

what Flying Blue charges, to be honest, on the Air Mauritius flights. So Air Canada Aeroplan is the one probably most people, I don't know, maybe you've got Air France miles, maybe you look at it there and tell me that it's much cheaper than I would have imagined. But the short version of the story is that there's not very much competition for those award seats, I don't think. It's also flying way out of the way if you want to go anywhere for the most part, because it's like Greg said, pretty far from Europe. But they have flights from London and Paris to Mauritius. And again, pretty easy to get four or five seats. So that's pretty cool. So he flew to Mauritius. And again, pretty easy to get four or five seats. So that's pretty cool. So we flew to Mauritius, spent five days in Mauritius at a lovely beachfront hotel, beautiful little stretch

of beach. Mauritius was very, very pretty. Roads are very windy and narrow. So be forewarned on that. That was our downfall. My younger son gets car sick very easily. And I meant to give the kids Dramamine motion sickness meds when we landed. And I forgot about it until we got in the rental car and we said, oh no, we forgot to give them Dramamine. Let's give it to them now and hope. And that hope lasted for 12 minutes before we had to pull over. They had to get 12 minutes into the ride. And so we had to pull over four times on the hour long trip to the hotel. So that was, uh, a tough, uh, you know, long drive there. And, uh, and so that limited our mobility in Mauritius a little bit, although we got by with drumming and other days a little bit better. So, um, so we spent five

days in Mauritius, mostly hanging out on the beach, which was nice. It was relaxing and gorgeous. And then flown to Kuala Lumpur, made a game time decision to switch things up and stay at the transit hotel in the Kuala Lumpur airport because everybody was tired. They hadn't gotten enough sleep on the flight. So we booked the transit hotel, which is convenient and clean enough and decent. It's overpriced compared to hotels in Kuala Lumpur. So if you can get into Kuala Lumpur, that'd be better. But if you just need a place to sleep. Is this airside? It is. Is this airside? It is.

So you didn't have to go through any kind of immigration or customs. You didn't have to go through any kind of security at all, right? Correct. You just land. You get into the transit hotel with your bags. Oh, so you were able to get your checked bags. So no, we didn't need them. So we checked our bags. Oh, so you were able to get your checked bags. So no, we didn't need them. So we checked our bags when we left Mauritius, we checked our bags to Singapore because we had the eight or nine hour layover in Kuala Lumpur, but we didn't need

the checked bags for that. We had a 16 and a half hour overnight layover next in Singapore. So we did need the bags in Singapore. So when I got to the airport in Mauritius, I asked them to check our bags through to Singapore so we could pick them up there. And I was pleasantly surprised that was very easy to do. So yeah, all we had was our carry-on bags, but the transit hotel was very close to the gate that we arrived at. So we had a pretty short walk to get to the transit hotel right next to the gates. Like Greg said, we didn't have to leave the secure area at all. So my wife and I did exactly that in Doha when we were on our way to South Africa. And yeah, it costs a lot more, but it's so nice. Like if you're not planning on spending time in whatever

that location is to just not have to do any of the usual airport rigmarole, because you're not actually leaving the secure area at all. You're just checking into a hotel and staying overnight and it makes it so easy. So yeah, I think that's a good way to go and it's worth the splurge when you need it. Yeah. So my one safety tip on that one is that Kuala Lumpur airport specifically, probably you'll run into this somewhere else, has a couple of hotels that are kind of labeled transit hotels. And specifically that Sama Sama Express that I stayed at, there's like a Sama Sama Airport Transit Hotel that's outside the secure area. And there's the Sama Sama Express that's inside the secure area. So make sure you

look at the details of the hotel before you book it because I almost booked the wrong one. And I was like, oh, no, it's not the one I wanted. I didn't want to have to go through immigration and have to go through airport security again and all those things. So was this one we went through recently. And like the international flights were like way off and like a satellite thing that you had to take a bus to. So is this in the satellite? So you don't even have to go to the main part of the airport. That's correct.

That's correct. We did after our time was up in the hotel, we did take the bus to that main part just to go to the lounge that was there, the Plaza Premium Lounge. But no, we wouldn't have had to have taken the bus at all because both the transit hotel and our arrival flight and departure flight were all in that little satellite by the sea gates. I think the transit hotel is by c5 or something like that so yeah so super convenient if you're flying through kuala lumpur i definitely can't uh recommend highly enough the convenience factor i mean it's not luxurious don't get your hopes up for a super luxurious hotel stay but it's a clean bed to sleep in for a few hours with nice views of the tarmac if you're into watching the planes. So there you go. Good for that. So we didn't do anything else but that in Kuala Lumpur and then flew on to Singapore and stayed overnight in

Singapore, got my J2 crispy curry puff in the Amoy Street Food Center. And so that was what I was there for. And I was happy to have gotten that. And sorry, just backing up a little bit. So I'm trying to remember, you flew Singapore Airlines from Kuala Lumpur. Thank you. Yes. So we flew Air Mauritius from Paris to Mauritius, had the five day stopover, then flew Air Mauritius from Mauritius to Kuala Lumpur. Air Mauritius also serves Perth and some places in India from Mauritius. So you've got some other options there. But we flew to Kuala Lumpur on Air Mauritius. And then, yes, it was Singapore Airlines business class from Kuala Lumpur to Singapore and from Singapore to Osaka. Two-sentence review of Air Mauritius and then Singapore.

Yep. Air Mauritius was fine. It was flatbed seats and food was okay. Service was friendly and warm nothing was gonna blow your mind it's not worth flying all the way to mauritius to experience flying air mauritius but i wouldn't avoid flying them in the future nothing was bad yeah just amazing you don't have direct aisle access at all seats is that right yes you do uh no no you probably don I'm sorry. I had to repicture it in my mind. So the reason that I was confused for a second about that is because we always take the two quote unquote middle seats in a layout that has two middle seats that are together. Because I mentioned before traveling with kids, it's convenient to be able to be next to them. So whether it's a one, two, one or to them. So, uh, so whether it's a

one, two, one or a two, two, two, we're always taking the two in the middle that do both have direct aisle access, but also are closer together so that we can help the kids with things. Uh, so no, actually that must've been a one, two, one, because otherwise we would have taken two on one of the sides in order to be closer to the window if I remember correctly. So that must've been a one, two, one. Um, and I do have more information about that in the post. So if I'm wrong, you'll see so on the post, but I do believe it was one, two, one. Uh, and then, um, so then we flew Singapore airlines business class on an eight three 50 from Kuala Lumpur to Singapore and on a seven 87 from Singapore to Osaka. So

that worked out nicely. Singapore. I always enjoy Singapore business class. I find their food to be good, their service to be excellent. And I like the seats. I know some people don't, but I find their padding particularly comfortable in general. Although I will say on this particular one, I liked the A350 more than the 787. I found the padding on the 787 to not be as comfortable, which they look like identical seats. I don't know why I found it less comfortable, but I did. So there you go. So just as an aside, I find that this is so first world problems, but I find that A350 to be more comfortable in general than a 787 as far as

like, I don't know if it's the air pressure or the conditioning of the air or something, but there's something that I just feel like I can, I feel more normal. Interesting. They do a better job of keeping the air quality, the quietness, just everything comfortable on the A350, in my opinion. And they're both supposed to be great in that regards, both types of jets. But there you go. Yeah, yeah.

Worth knowing, worth knowing, yeah. And speaking of the layouts and things, I should also mention that I, so when I, we flew, well, all the flights, but the Air Mauritius flight specifically that I was talking about a second ago, we took the two seats in the middle. And in the middle,

in the type of configuration they have, which is somewhat common, the two seats can either be right next to each other. This is similar to United Polaris. If you've ever flown that two seats can be right next to each other where you know, you're, you can touch the person next to you and the tables are on the outside facing the aisle, right? Or they could have the tables in the middle where you're farther away and then your body is closer to the aisle or they could have the tables in the middle where you're farther away and then your body is closer to the aisle with kids i always prefer having the ones that are immediately next to each other with the tables on the outside for two reasons number one i can help easier if i need to switch something on the in-flight entertainment or clean up a spill or something like that it's a lot easier to reach everything when there's not a table between us

so that's nice for that and then the other reason it's nice is because it's less commotion from the aisle. So when you recline them to sleep, it's more like they're in a cocoon and they don't get disturbed by people passing by and whatnot. So I always consider that in the layout when I'm selecting seats flying with the kids. Yeah. Shoot, I do that when flying with my wife too. Well, that makes sense. I'd rather be in those two middle ones together. Yeah. Shoot. I do that one flying with my wife too. I'd rather be in those two middle ones together. Yeah. That makes sense. So, uh, so, all right. So we flew again, all the way to Osaka, Japan, and just didn't fly the leg from Osaka to Guam. So why did I book it that way? Because Air Canada, Aeroplan has, uh, their, one of their routing rules. So you could fly, you know,

up and down and left and right as much as you want, but the total distance that you fly cannot be more than double the distance from your origin point to your final ending point. So for this particular award, the origin point was Paris and the final ending point was Guam. So that meant that we could fly double the distance of a straight line from Paris to Guam in total. And because we were flying to Mauritius, which is pretty far out of the way, I needed an endpoint that was really far from Paris. Otherwise, the zigzagging would get to be too much and the award wouldn't have been bookable.

Right, right. So that was a booking trick that you did to kind of trick it into allowing the routing you wanted. Correct, correct. Japan wasn't far enough from Paris to make that work. It would have been more than double the distance. Yeah. And I think it bears saying again that it was important for you to have that final flight that you didn't intend to take be the next day after you arrive in Osaka, because otherwise, even if you get them to agree to check your bags just to Osaka, it might not actually happen that way. But by having it the next day, like it's totally reasonable that you need your bags. And so even if you arrived and they had messed up, you could demand that they get those bags off the plane for you. Whereas if it was

same day, I think it would be much harder to make that argument. It might be. Yeah. It might be much harder to make the argument, but with the 23 hour and 55 minute layover scheduled in Osaka, there wasn't even an eyebrow raised about checking bags just to Osaka. That was just automatically what they did. I'm also not sure in that specific instance,

I'm not sure if they would have checked them all the way through or not. Since the flight was to the United States, I'm not sure if they would have checked them all the way through or not, since the flight was to the United States. I'm not sure if they would have allowed that or not. I don't know. So I didn't find out because I didn't need to. So anyway, so that was that was that we ended up in Osaka and Osaka was awesome. We've been there before. And the last time we were there, we said, wow, this is so cool. We didn't have any expectations. We kind of picked it the first time because there was a St. Regis there and we had, I don't know, Marriott points or Starwood preferred guests back then. And so we were like, oh, we're going to stay at this fancy St. Regis and we'll still be an easy train ride from Kyoto and from Kobe to go get some Kobe beef and stuff like that.

And we ended up loving Osaka the first time where we said, wow, we should have planned to spend more time doing more stuff in Osaka than we did. So this time around, we planned a few nights in Osaka. And again, we were like, wow, we should have planned one or two fewer nights in Tokyo and one or two more nights in Osaka. We really like Osaka. So that was good. We had a great stay there, enjoyed that, and then took the train to Tokyo. So we took the Shinkansen, the bullet train to Tokyo. And that was mostly for the kids to get the experience. They were excited about that. We had talked, talked it up a little bit.

And so they were excited about the fast train, which of course my six-year-old said it didn't feel that fast. So he was, I think, underwhelmed. It didn't feel fast enough for him. But, uh, but we did that and we booked that and paid cash for that. And that was more expensive than flying would have been. We could have used miles and that would have been a better deal to fly but flying within japan with miles is super cheap uh with certain miles and so uh yeah that's a good deal i it's funny i had the

same experience as your kids uh with when i did that which was like i was excited beforehand about about the train ride and then i get on and I mean, yeah, it looks like the telephone poles and things are going by really fast. But otherwise, it just felt like a train ride. It didn't feel special in any way that I could think of. And so, yeah, I would just as well fly in the future. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So would I. So would I next time.

I mean, it's reasonably fast. I think it was two and a half hours from Osaka to Tokyo. So I guess when you build in the time to get to the airport early enough to check in and go through security and then you've got to get from the airport, it could save you Tokyo. I mean, it might, yeah, it might not be faster to fly, but, uh, but it would have been cheaper for sure to fly. So that would have been something to consider and actually i ran into somebody at the hotel in tokyo that was trying to get to osaka and trains were canceled because there had been some storms i don't know whether flights were canceled or not but but he was frustrated because they had been at the hotel a few extra days already because they hadn't been

able to get to osaka and i was thinking to myself i'm sure there's more availability but uh but you know of course i didn't know whether he had points or not. But or whether the flights were going, I guess, for that matter, because there had been some storms. But anyway, we spent a couple days in Osaka. Then we took the train to Tokyo. And then in Tokyo, we enjoyed the chance to, well, first of all, go to Team Labs, which is something we did on our Party of Five trip. We went to Team Lab Planets. Loved it.

In the summer of 2023. Yeah. And that was great, right? Oh, it was totally. And totally worth building a trip around going to that again and going to the other one like you did. Yeah, yeah. Because now there are two. When we went, there was just TeamLab Planets and they were building TeamLab Borderless.

Now there's both. So there's two different team lab experiences in, in Tokyo and both were cool and totally worth it. And I would do both again. If we went back to Tokyo next year, I would, I would probably return to both of them again. Those are just really, really cool.

So you can look those up if you're not familiar and you can see we have reels and pictures and stuff like that. So you can get an idea of what to expect. But it was weird trying to explain to my kids what that was going to be when we were telling them what we were doing. And when my son said, what is it? And I was like, well, it's like sort of like an art exhibit, but you're inside the art. And my wife was like, I'm not sure you're selling it. And I was like, yeah, okay. I'm not sure that that makes it sound exciting to a kid either, but my kids loved it. They had a ton of fun. They really

enjoyed it. So, and at the end I said, well, what would you say it was to our older son? And he said, it was like an art exhibit. He was like, you know, there wasn't, you didn't have a better way to describe it either. He was very much like, oh, you're right. There's not really a good way to describe what it is, but it was neat. So. so, so probably better to just like lie to your kids and say something like whatever they're into. It's like paw patrol, but you're inside the action. True, true, true. I could probably find a way to, uh, to twist that around, but yes, to get them excited. That would have been a, that would have been the way to do it, I guess. So, yeah, so we spent a few days in Tokyo. And when I say in Tokyo, I say that to differentiate between staying in Tokyo and staying near Tokyo DisneySea because we spent our last few nights staying near the Tokyo Disney Parks, which are outside of Tokyo proper. They're a distance. It's like, I don't know, it was more than an hour, I think.

They're like Ryanair Airport distance away, huh? Right. You can call it Tokyo, but it's pretty far away from most of Tokyo. So if you want to do touristy stuff in Tokyo, I recommend staying somewhere much closer to the touristy stuff for that part of your trip and staying near Disney for the Disney part of your trip. We ran into a family that was spending two weeks at one of those Tokyo Disney hotels. And I just thought that would be so inconvenient. And without me saying that, they said how they'd been spending their whole day out every day because it was so inconvenient to get back and forth. So they were just leaving the hotel in the morning and spending all day away from the hotel and then going back just to go to bed at night kind of a thing.

So as I think about it, Tokyo Narita airport's really far from Tokyo as well. It is. Yeah. Is it in that direction? Really far still. It is. And it still takes like- Still further. Yeah. Well, so the bus would have been an hour and a half from the Hilton Tokyo to Narita airport, or we took public transit and it was about the same hour and a half, I think, from the Hilton, more or less, somewhere around there. So, yeah, either way, it's not terribly convenient still to get to Narita.

But I would have thought it would have been shorter. Looking at the map, and that's really deceiving. If you look at the map, you'll be like, oh, well, that's really close to A and B. And it's not. It still takes a while to get everywhere. And an Uber would have been $175 from the Hilton Tokyo Bay to Narita. So that was not a particularly cost effective way either. But at any rate,

so we stayed three nights at the Hilton Tokyo Bay, which is a Hilton, but it is one of the Disney resort hotels. It's actually like on the sort of, I'm going to say on property it's on their monorail. So it's one stop away from both Disney parks, one stop before you get to Disney sea, one stop after Disneyland. So I mean, you can't get much more convenient than that.

Absolutely. Yeah. That's great. Yeah. Yeah, it is. It is very, very convenient for visiting the Disney parks and they've got a gift shop with Disney stuff. It's all the same prices at the park, right in the hotel and convenience stores in the hotel. It wasn't my favorite Hilton ever. I was particularly

annoyed by the fact that they charge per person to use the pool. But my understanding now is that that's pretty common in Japan, I guess. I had never encountered that before, but I guess that's a thing. So at any rate, the hotel was fine. Not great, but fine. Disney, Tokyo Disney was a lot of fun. We had a great time there. It's going to depend on what time of year you go and what day. We got really lucky in the sense that there were almost no lines because there was a bad weather forecast for the day that didn't really materialize to be very bad at all. So we were really lucky. We got good weather and almost no line for most of the rides that we went on. So that was nice. It's also much more affordable than Disney in the United States. The ticket prices were cheaper.

The food was cheaper. The souvenirs were cheaper, which is all penance. It's not a high bar for something to be cheaper than Disney in the US. Just putting that out there. Very, very true. Yeah. So kids up to three go free at disney and so my three-year-old didn't need a ticket so three tickets for my wife and i and our son were about

160 actually now that i think about it i think we paid an extra 10 ish because we went on a saturday we had originally booked for a friday for the 160 we ended up switching to Saturday because of a weather forecast, but also because of a tip from a friend of the blog. So we had gotten a tip from Stefan, who writes Rapid Travel Chai, that at least in Shanghai Disney, he had told me once that Saturdays are more expensive, and you might think Saturday is the crowded day, so you don't want to go on Saturdays. But he had told me years ago that because it's more expensive, the cheaper tour groups don't go on Saturdays because they want to sell these tours for a cheaper price. So the tour groups tend to go on the cheaper days of the week, like the Wednesdays or whatever day it is. So the crowds are actually smaller on the day when it's more expensive to go to the park. So, uh, and I don't know if that's why there were fewer people or it was mostly because of the weather. I mean, the weather certainly could have been a big piece of it because there was quite a bit of rain forecast, but the crowds were not out of control

on the Saturday we were there. So that's great. Pretty, pretty happy for that. Uh, but when I say cheaper, I mean like ice cream sandwiches were like like 250 at the park and tickets were 160, 170 bucks. Like, you know, we, four of us ate for 30 ish dollars at one of the little grab and goes, which again, I mean, it's not cheap, but for Disney, like compared to going in Orlando anyway, it was much cheaper. That is cheap. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. So, so that was good and it was fun kids had a great time we had a great time and uh so i would totally go back and do that again and i'm not a disney person for the record like i i kind of dislike going to disney uh i don't like how expensive it is that's for

sure i feel like it's just designed to separate me from my money as much as possible and everything's pretty overpriced in general i thought tokyo was decent and fair so i would go back to tokyo disney again um so that was that and then from tokyo we got back home on hawaiian airlines and so that was a cheap airfare so i had been looking at award tickets but i said well let me just see i always like to take a look and see what paid fares are like because there are a number of different ways to use points at a value of one and a half cents per point or so, more or less, depending on how you do it towards paid fares. And so I always like to get an idea of what the paid fares might be to see if that might be an equal or even better value sometimes. And I didn't expect that that would be the case flying

from Japan to the United States in business class. But I was very surprised when I found that at the time when I booked it, business class from Tokyo to New York was less than $1,500 a person. It was $1,480, I think, per person in business class on Hawaiian Airlines. And while I wouldn't have probably spent almost $6,000 on cash tickets for my family of four, I was happy to use points at one and a half cents per point. I used the business platinum card actually with Amex. So I paid with membership rewards points and got a 35% rebate because that card, when you use a membership rewards points, you get 35% of your points back when you fly either on your chosen airline or in any airline in business or first class. So Hawaiian wasn't my chosen airline, but because it was in business class,

I got 35% of the points back. So I paid 148,000 or so points to begin with and then got 35% back. So the net cost was a little over 96,000 membership rewards points per person to fly business class from Tokyo to New York, stopping in Honolulu. So that was fair. That's about what a lot of programs charge in business class for an award seat. And we earned miles. And then you earned, what, 13,000 something miles each? That's right. Yep.

13,200 Hawaiian miles each, which are probably by the time this publishes, Alaska miles. Yeah. That's amazing. Right, right. You looked into that. Great value from that extra rebate on top of the Amex membership rewards rebate. That's amazing. Right, right. You looked into that. Great value from that extra rebate on top of the Amex membership rewards rebate. a dole whip and do the world's largest maze, which was actually made for a great layover because after you spent all this time sitting on the airplanes and sitting in the airport, it was nice to get outside and walk around the maze. I think it was great for the kids.

Got the blood pumping. They ran around some. They could be noisy and have fun. And so that was good. I thought it made for a great little layover stop. And so we did that and went back to the airport and flew back to New York. And that was our summer vacation. And Hawaiian Airlines business class, a quick review?

It's fine. So Hawaiian Airlines is out with a new suite on their 787 that looks really nice. And we could have booked that for about the same price to Los Angeles. And originally, that's actually what I booked. I booked Tokyo to Honolulu to Los Angeles for $20 a person less than what New York ended up costing. So I booked to Los Angeles just assuming that New York would have been way more. Actually, stupidly, I didn't look up the price to New York at that time. I looked up West Coast cities to start. And I booked it to Los Angeles without even thinking that New York would be reasonable. And then as soon as I booked it to Los Angeles, I was like, oh, I didn't think to check New York. And I checked New York and I was like,

oh, wow, it's only like $20 a person more. So we had to call Amex and change the same day we booked that actually, funny enough. But that was easy enough to do anyway. So, but yeah, so their A330, which is what we flew on both segments is most people don't like it. I'm not as opposed to it as most people. It's very open. So if you like a really open cabin that doesn't feel

claustrophobic, it's good for that. And if you're somebody who sleeps sort of like, if you're somebody who gets bothered by the tiny footwells to put your feet, you'll like Hawaiian Airlines business class. Again, the older style on the A330, because it's very open, similar to the LATAM, not similar in style, but similar in openness to LATAM business class that we flew on our Party of Five trip. So it's nice because you got plenty of space for your feet, and it's very open. On the flip side, almost no privacy. So that part is a negative if you want to be cocooned in your own little private space you don't get that really at all in hawaiian airlines business class uh and the in-flight entertainment is on an ipad which is so annoying because they don't pass them out until after you're already

in the sky and we were delayed for like an hour and a half two hours at the outset so there was no in-flight entertainment while we're sitting there on the tarmac and then they pick them back up like i don't know half an hour 45 minutes before you land that's not good yeah no it's not how about food and service uh service so let me come back service food was not very good at all i was it was really pleasantly or not pleasantly unpleasantly surprised by the food so uh yeah not good and their lounge in honolulu is like oh i know that's terrible it's terrible it's's terrible. It's awful. People line up to get in and then you get in and you're like, why did I waste my time trying to get in here? Right. It's like it was much nicer out there in the general airport.

Sure, there's no free food, but I'm not sure you'd call what little bit is in there food anyway. Yeah. It's pretty comical. Yeah, it is and and they it amazes me because they sell tickets to korea and japan and they have flights hawaiian airlines has flights to korea and japan and tahiti i mean there are places that are far enough that people are flying and then if they're connecting and going on to the mainland u.s like you would expect they might be hungry or need a shower and you don't have much food or and no showers i just blows my mind i wonder if it's it's the worst like major lounge in the u.s it's

gotta be you know where you have where you have major international traffic i mean yeah yeah i mean for a hub like for a hub lounge that's what i was thinking i was like i have never been in an airlines hub lounge that was nearly so bad. I don't think I've ever been in a worse one. Yeah, no, I totally can believe it. That's my memory of it, too. Yeah. Really pathetic.

And you can't get in there with priority pass, by the way. So you don't even need to be, you can't just get in with priority pass. Although at the time I was there, there was a sign that they were at capacity and you couldn't get in with priority pass. You had to get on a wait list. And when she saw our boarding passes and saw we were flying first in New York, she said, oh, I'm sorry for the wait and apologized because I was thinking to myself, there probably aren't that many people buying the tickets just for the lounge access.

That's for sure. Most folks are probably their priority pass because, man, not good. But anyway, we've harped on that enough. The service, though, I have to give Hawaiian credit. Service was really good on both the flights that we had and particularly on the Honolulu to New York, outstanding service. The head of the team there, the lead flight attendant was just fantastic. She was so friendly. I overheard her talking to everybody about what they'd been doing in Japan and what they were going to be doing and was constantly checking on people to see what else they needed

and thinking of what they needed ahead of time. It was the type of service you often get on foreign airlines, but I don't get as often on airlines based in the US. So I was very impressed. She took great care of us and not only during the flight, but afterwards, I forgot I left my little handbag on the plane that had all of our passports on it. And I only during the flight, but afterwards, I forgot I left my little handbag on the plane that had all of our passports on it. And I realized when we got to pick up our bags, I said, oh, no, I left it on there. And so I went, I found an employee in the baggage claim area, and he said he'd call and the cleaners would probably find it and bring it there. And eventually they did. But I saw that lead flight attendant find the baggage guy to tell him when the team from the flight was leaving, she found him to tell him that she found a bag in the overhead and gave it to the cleaners took the initiative to give it to someone. And then not just took the initiative to give it to someone, but made sure that the person in the baggage claim area knew that she did so that it wouldn't get lost somewhere.

I just thought that was a really exemplary service. So I was impressed. Great job, Hawaiian. All right. So that was that. So you flew literally around the world with your family in business class for all the long haul flights. You got decent, if not great, and in some cases, great, um, award prices, uh, and, uh, had what looks like just an incredible trip.

Uh, so thank you for talking us through how you did that. I think that's awesome. Um, uh, so you said at the beginning that part of this was like an experiment to see whether you could sort of home travel school your children. What was the result? Like, like, yeah, didn't work out or did. Yeah. So so I mentioned at the beginning that this is sort of a test run to do it part time. So before we had kids, we had talked about taking the kids

out at some point and homeschooling to travel and teach. Because years ago, I read an article about two teachers that took their kids out of school for a year. And they planned a bike trip from northern Alaska to the southern tip of Argentina and taught their kids math with currency conversion and history by going to see things. And so they took a year doing this bicycle trip. And I thought that sounded so cool. And so we had been talking about that since long before we had kids. So we kind of had some ambition to do that. But we also thought a whole year of homeschool was kind of daunting.

And we weren't sure that we could handle that. I mean, I'm not naive enough to think that a teacher's job is easy. So I never thought that would be a simple thing to do. But then we came into meeting more and more people that are doing it and found that it's possible to do part of the year that you don't necessarily have to do the entire year, you could just disenroll for a period of time and then re enroll. And so that was an option that we never knew existed. And when that became an option, we said, Oh, well, I could totally see disenrolling for a quarter, homeschooling for a quarter, and then going back. Because hopefully, even if we

don't do as well as we hope, then they won't get too far behind and they still get the school experience and the socialization and all that. So, it seemed like maybe it would be a good balance. I said at the beginning of this little segment here that we weren't naive enough to think that a teacher's job is easy. And we found that we were right, that it's not so easy. So, it was challenging. I mean, truth be told, we got through all the work. And I think it was really beneficial because our son's been doing very well with a lot of the types of things that we practiced over the summer so far. This school year, it's early in the school year, so who knows, we'll see. But I think that the practice over the summer certainly helped. I don't know that we were as successful as we wanted to be regularly having lessons. It was more so getting the stuff that we

intended to finish more than building in the lessons we wanted. But that said, there's so many educational things when you travel. We visited some really cool museums and I'm constantly surprised by the things that they remember, even when I didn't think they were listening. One day we went to the Museum of Emerging Science and Technology in Tokyo and they had a display on digital or an exhibit on digital versus analog display. And so it kind of showed the code going by on the screen as it had a very simple image. And so I kind of tried to explain to my son that like all the images are really ones and zeros and it's all programmed into a computer and the computer decodes those ones and zeros and creates an image that you see. And I connected it to his Nintendo Switch and I said, so when you see Luigi running across the screen, it's really ones and zeros that things all put together kind of a thing. And I didn't really think he was listening at that moment to tell you the truth, but I said it and I went, okay, whatever. And then like a week later, he was playing his Nintendo Switch in the lounge and he said, Daddy, did you know this is really ones and zeros?

I love it. Good job. All right. We were listening. I didn't know that. That's really good to know. Thanks for teaching me that. So, yeah, I mean, so things like that stick sometimes along the way. And so, you know, I think we both walked away saying that was it didn't go as well as we wanted it to on that front.

But at the same time, there are things like that that tell me, well, maybe there was some good value in it and maybe we still could pull it off. I don't know. We'll see. We'll revisit after we see how school year begins anyway this year and revisit the idea of doing it. But yeah, well, at the very least, I think it's likely that we would do a longer trip like that in the summer again, whether or not, I think maybe next year if we did something like that, it might be domestic rather than international just to do something different and show them a piece of the United States that we haven't seen yet. But at any rate, it was totally worth the experiment at the very least. And we'll see. I'm not convinced yet one way or another that it'll happen or not happen. Yeah. All right. Well, great trip report. You did a good job on your homework of what did you do over summer vacation.

Okay. We tried. We tried. Yeah. Well, and then we were talking about it. My wife and I saying, what are the kids going to say when the teacher asked them what they did over summer vacation? And I mentioned Nintendo Switch. Kids do have a Nintendo Switch, but we don't usually play at home. I mean, maybe once every couple of weeks we play at home not very often and but but they know that when they're on planes and in lounges that that's the time we can play nintendo because we let them play on an airplane or you know in a lounge so we're not disturbing other people so they did play much more on the trip than they do at home and then we were saying they're gonna say they played nintendo that's their yeah it's also you know i played nintendo

over summer vacation that's when when my son was young he got to watch ben 10 all he wanted to and so that's what that's what he did for his travels there you go there you go you see that's those are the things but but you know it helps the trip go smoothly and uh and probably didn't hurt anybody so so that's that all right i think that wraps up our main event for today and uh brings us to this week's question of the week. So for this week's question of the week, I have one that I'm going to ask you that we've talked about a little bit, but I want to know if you have an update. If you don't, I'll add one. as a coupon for a Dunkin' credit. It's a monthly $7 Dunkin' credit. And so we had some talk on the show about what will it work for? Will it only work for Dunkin'?

Does it work for Baskin-Robbins? Do you have any update for us, Greg? Can I use the monthly $7 credit at Baskin-Robbins to get ice cream and not have to get donuts? Yes, we do have a update on that. Yes, as a matter of fact, we do have an update to that. So Reed wrote in and said, just a data point on the Amex Gold Duncan credit. Went to a Duncan.

It got coded as a Baskin Robbins. Still got the credit. So let's just decode that a little bit. He used his Amex Gold card to buy something at a Dunkin' store and it showed up on his credit card account as a B baskin robbins or duncans it's still gonna you're still uh gonna get that um what is it seven dollar credit for that yes and i i've i've heard people speculate that this may depend on uh on the location so So if you find a contrary data point, let us know. But I have heard some people say that they assume that if the location is primarily a Duncan location and it has a Baskin Robbins inside it, that it will probably trigger it. And if it's just a Baskin Robbins, it might not. But this data point seems to refute the idea that it wouldn't. And the reason, of course,

this is a thing is because Duncan owns Baskin Robbins. And so the credit is for a Duncan purchase, but because they also own Baskin Robbins, we had speculated that maybe a Baskin Robbins charge would work. And it seems at least for Reed and a number of other people that have reported it, that Baskin charges have indeed worked for the gold card monthly $7 Duncan credit. So if you don't want Duncan or you don't have a Duncan nearby, but you got Baskin Robbins, there you have it. You can get some overpriced ice cream. I don't even know that it's overpriced. People have said that it's overpriced. I haven't been to a Baskin Robbins.

Yeah, I don't know. Compared to some others, I kind of doubt it's overpriced. I haven't been to a Baskin-Robbins. Yeah, I don't know. Compared to some others, I kind of doubt it's overpriced or relative. But I'm finding it hilarious how much time we're spending on analyzing this $7 monthly credit. Well, you know, it's funny. So Tim had mentioned that Dunkin' bought a chain called Mr. Donut, which I don't think exists anymore in the United States because I think they've converted it all to Duncan. But he mentioned that there were still Mr. Donut locations in Japan. And so I sure enough came across one while I was in Japan over the summer and I figured, oh, I've got to give this a try. So I used my gold card

at Mr. Donut in Japan. It did not code as Duncan and it did not give me the credit. You're out seven bucks. Oh man. So if you go to Japan, you're like, oh, I'm going to go to Mr. Donut and try and use my gold card. I'll save you the trouble. It's not going to work. Good luck with that. All right. Don't ever let it be said that we're not saving you $7. That's right. I mean, we're out there doing the research, folks. All right. I'm doing it for the sake of science. I got a donut. I filled myself with that sugary awfulness that was surely going to take a few minutes off my life at some point and did it just for you and for $7 that it cost me out of pocket. At any rate, that brings us to the end of today's episode. If you've enjoyed this stuff and you'd like to get more in your email inbox each day or each week, you want to

go to frequentmiler.com slash subscribe to join one of our email lists. You can follow us on all the various social media. Join our Frequent Miler Insiders Facebook group, where you can discuss this type of stuff all day, every day. And if you have a question that you'd like to be considered for a future question of the week or for a giant mailbag segment, you can send that to send it to mailbag at frequentmiler.com. Bye, everybody.