Donny Foy

Japan rugby trip in 2019 was the inspiration for an award travel odyssey that would make Odysseus say "Dude, just pay cash." Pandemic hit pause, but miles were set to evaporate. Found the perfect RTW itinerary to scratch every travel itch - Japan's cherry blossoms, Egyptian pyramids, Irish pubs, Africa with friends, and wide-open Pampas vistas. Booking was a comedy of errors - struggling to find award seats, ANA not playing nice, hoursworth of hold messages on infinite repeat. Finally ticketed, only to get a "Yo, Carloine" name fail. More holds, a minor meltdown, and presto! New itinerary minus the Godfather names but better and cheaper. Time for a celebratory drink.

(Summary (mostly) by Claude.ai)

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The Looooooong Version:

Japan. October 2019. Rugby World Cup. An amazing trip (even with Ireland’s early, unexpected loss to Japan) 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.

Obsessively confirm the flights and dates on the issued itinerary. Good to go.

3 Weeks later, an email from ANA. Minor change to one flight time but 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:
1) Split my ticket from the reservation and rebook (not feasible given the difficulty in finding the same award seat available as Donny’s ticket, let alone seats together),
2) Take a chance and try to change my name with each airline at check-in (hard pass given language barriers and just the chance they’d give me a hard NOPE!), or
3) Rebook everything. 🤦‍♀️

End the call. Pitch an absolute lose-my-sh*t fit that I’m not proud of. Sigh.

Award Seat Search Take 2 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 last hour-long date with ANA’s repeating hold messages and the same very nice woman rebooked our updated itinerary, sans cool godfather name but $500 cheaper. 🙌

Obsessively confirm my name spelling on the new itinerary.

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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.com/?color=#FCCB00&a…Read more