How it all began

Japan. October 2019. Rugby World Cup. An amazing trip and we vowed to return. Donny found a smokin’ deal to transfer AmEx points to ANA. Boom.

Yeah, Boom as in Pandemic. ☹️

Three (hundred) years pass and those miles are going to expire. Start searching, discover Star Alliance’s Round the World ticket. Used their great planning tool (link below) to map out a route that checks the box on bunch of our travel goals:
• Japan because cherry blossoms (plus bullet trains! And geishas! And food!)
• Egypt because Donny’s niece’s wedding (plus Pyramids!)
• Ireland for family (new baby!), horsey things (racing season & RDS!), and golf (of course!)
• Cape Town because native friends will be there too (plus safari!)
• South America because retiring in the USA is $$$$ (plus Pampas! And polo! And the Andes!)

Over to ANA’s booking site to search award seats for each flight, ONE frustrating day at a time. Learned that ANA must not play nicely in the Star Alliance sandbox because award seats available on other members’ sites do not exist in the ANA universe. 🤔

Booking via phone was relatively straightforward (after the 1+ hour hold time) given all the award flight searching beforehand. 400k ANA miles + $3k and we’re ready to roll on 8 biz class flights over 1 year covering ~35,000 flight miles.

Three weeks later, an email arrives from ANA announcing a minor change to one flight time. I happen to notice my name is spelled Carloine (which, consequently is now my cool Godfather name).

No big deal to just swap those two letters, right? Hahaha, that’s adorable. It is, indeed, a VERY BIG DEAL. 😳

I’m told by a lovely woman (after another 1+hr wait on the phone) that not all the carriers allow name changes so we can basically either take a chance on correcting my name at the time of each flight or rebook the whole thing from scratch. I end the call and pitch an absolute lose-my-sh*t conniption fit. Then, as Donny says, I stick my hand up my arse and pull myself together and start over.

Award Seat Search 2.0 went much faster thanks to lessons learned the first go-round and resulted in 2 wins: biz class on our first leg (we just have to get to Montreal) and a few better route choices. One final hour on hold, then rebooked our updated itinerary, sans cool godfather name but $500 cheaper. 🙌

Obsessively confirm my name spelling on the new itinerary. 🧐 Ready to roll!

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Tools I found helpful for award flight search:

Star Alliance Round the World tool (for rules, hubs & routes, and calculating total flight miles to determine how many airline miles you’ll need): https://roundtheworld.staralliance.com/staralli…

Flight Connections (for possible connecting flight routes, in case award seats on direct routes aren’t available; subscription required to filter by alliance or carrier): https://www.flightconnections.com/

Seats.aero (for finding potential award seat availability and alerts; covers most major airlines and route, but not all; monthly subscription required for extended search beyond 60 days): https://seats.aero

Airline Alliance and Award Point Infographic: https://welltraveledmile.com/airline-transfer-p…

Interactive & customizable world map (for visualizing flight routes and calculating distance flown): https://www.greatcirclemap.comRead more