Thursday, June 12, 2008

Airline tickets secured ... OUCH!

Well I went ahead and bit the bullet and bought the roundtrip airline tickets for this trip ... we decided that buying them now vs waiting and hoping airfares would decrease closer to the actual trip was probably foolish in this time of astronomical fuel prices ... hope we didn't screw that up!

A few things about airfare prices nowdays ...

  • #1 ... they ain't cheap
  • #2 ... Using American Airline frequent flyer miles is apparently virtually impossible now. I had HOPED I could get at least one roundtrip ticket with 40k-50k airmiles ... not so much ... in fact ... unless I was willing to go 100k airmiles (which is way more than I have) ... I could not get a flight that accommodated or even almost accommodated our travel dates ... I am beginning to suspect that they ask for your travel dates and then specifically block those out of available frequent flyer mile seats. It's odd though because I was able to book two round trip first class tickects to Vancouver for the Alaska trip with out any hassle.
  • #3 ... Using American Airline frequent flyer miles to UPGRADE a purchased ticket is also a joke ... see a trend here? I thought I'd BUY the tickets and then upgrade to 1st class with miles ... no problem ... 50k miles per ticket .... NOT!!!!!!!!


We are flying Continental Airlines ... Leave San Antonio Friday November 7 and return Sunday November 23 .... we will overnight in Rome 11/8 and 11/9 to see some sights there before we depart on the ship and then we will overnight in Rome again 11/22 before the flight back home.

1 comment:

Unknown said...

I am glad that you got the tickets! It would be a really far swim otherwise!! (I actually think that if you plug in directions to New York from Europe in google maps, it tells you to swim.)

You guys are going to have so so much fun! I expect you to be fluent in Italian after your 2 days in Rome! :)