Travel

Basic Economy Does Do One Thing Right

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Delta Airlines Commuter Jet Airplane

Basic Economy is horrible,. I want to get that out there now. Why? Because I want to select my seat. I don’t want to get on the plane last. I don’t want a ticket I cannot change no matter what. Not even with a crazy fee. Even without kids and the need to be sure we are sitting together (not next to the toilet in the back row) I want to select my seat ahead of time.

What Basic Economy does well is make you happy to have Regular Economy. I have read analysts say this before. As I was doing the happy dance that we got 4 checked luggage on our flight to NY in July I realized how right that analyst was. It’s an international flight. I used to have 2 checked luggage per person. Now I get one and I am happy about it. Why because the ticket we had in June had none. I thought I would have to pay for checking some bags till I realized it’s included.

Well played airlines. Well played indeed.

Priority Boarding According To RyanAir

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What feels like a lifetime ago (1999-2000) I used to travel full-time for work. Traveling that much got me slightly jaded on travel in general. Not the actual seeing new places. The process of getting from point A to point B. I grew particular in certain things that I like and try to make sure that there is a bare minimum of comfort when traveling.

One of those things is getting an assigned seat. The first time I flew Southwest I was completely confused even though I had boarding group 1.

In January we took a trip to Italy. We had never had the privilege of flying Ryanair before. We didn’t want to pay for checked bags. We didn’t have enough stuff to warrant the need for it anyway. With Ryanair however you cannot simply bring carry-on bags either. That’s an extra charge. Since we wanted to bring In bags anyway we paid for priority boarding. The bags in the cabin came with that purchase. Since we went for a week two carry one was fine. The girls luggage is an even that big. If we needed more stuff we could’ve simply brought a bigger bag instead of their little luggage.

What we didn’t realise was that half of the plane gets “priority boarding”. While standing in line for 20 minutes waiting for priority boarding to start I counted at least 50 people ahead of us. And we were not at the back of the line. I get the buying of carry-on bags. I don’t agree with it however I understand that decision. What I don’t understand is if you sell priority boarding and  a huge percentage of people by how is that a priority? Basically were paying so were not last. Yet it’s nowhere near what I would consider “priority”‘s.

This was the first phone lesson we learned flying RyanAir. The next one was there was no jet bridge and we had to walk out onto the tarmac and then back onto the plane. Then we arrived in Italy the shuttle bus that we had to squeeze onto to get to the terminal was just icing on the cake. I don’t need to fly business class however this was kind of less than what I would expect for basic service. I wouldn’t even say our tickets were that cheap.

We decided to try to avoid them in the future. Unfortunately as of  when I am writing this post we have another holiday planned with flights from them. In that instance the tickets were cheaper than others yet not cheap. Since the flights only about an hour we decided to just deal with it.

Welcome to Rome

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Knowing you are blatantly being ripped off by the airport cab guy but don’t care since you have two cranky kids in a foreign country. Priceless, or really just the €10 extra I was being charged.

My Story of A Tail of Two Credit Card Concierge’s

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I can calculate how long I have had an American Express card in Decades not years. During most of that time I have been aware some of the benefits offered that I never took advantage of.  One of those benefits is the personal concierge service. For years I knew it could be a valuable tool yet I only once used it. Thinking back I cannot come up with a good reason not to use this service. Maybe it was because I am a control freak. I like researching things on my own. When I worked at Datastream Systems they had their own travel people in house.  The job required constant travel. I still would research what I wanted and call the travel people and tell them to book me on specific flights. So either I was a control freak or just lazy not wanting to talk to someone to make plans with a concierge. Either way this potentially valuable service went unused. With an upcoming trip I decided to change that.

My mom came to visit and we all went to Paris. She has been great and offered M and I to go on a date night while we are there. Not knowing the city i figured why shouldn’t i try the American Express concierge and see what they can come up with based on the criteria we have. We want a restaurant no more than 30-45 min from our hotel on the metro. We are looking for a French place known for their sea food. We also want a place that has good cocktails. I also provided the two dates we were looking at for possible reservations. The requirements were simple enough.  I did not want to spend hours on tripadvisor or whatever review site is popular in Paris trying to find a place.

The call to the Amex Concierge was simple enough. Using the mobile I had on file and a preset code I created when setting up the account I was authenticated and ready to go when the representative got on the phone. When I spoke to the representative I gave her my criteria and she said she was going to email or call me with options. I chose for her to email me.

Once i was done with American Express I decided to source options from somewhere else and turn this experiment into a full fledge comparison. I just got a VISA card that offered VISA Infinite concierge. I was curious if they were any good either so I figured why not try them out too. Calling VISA was slightly less straight forward. I had to provide my card number twice to an automated system. Once I got someone on the phone I gave the VISA people the same criteria. The lady i spoke with was super friendly and helpful. Like the person I spoke to at AMEX she offered to call me back or email me. Again I opted for an email.

American Express sent me an email within an hour of our call with four options. They also gave me a PDF guidebook of restaurants where they have special offers in Europe. One specific thing that was annoying was I told them we were going Sunday or Monday night. One of their suggestions wasn’t even open those days. All the options they gave us did look great. We had two favorites right away from the list we were given.

Visa infinite said they would send details up to four hours later. Because of the time we called I didn’t read their email until the next day. They sent a PDF with the options included. The format was definitely nicer looking then AMEX. After looking over the options M didn’t like any of them. I didn’t have time to look at it myself so I won’t directly comment on the quality. I will say that the customer service rep I spoke to from the visa infinite pointed out that many places are closed Sunday or Monday in France and would be on the lookout for that in selecting options. That was a good catch especially since the American Express rep sent us an option we couldn’t even use.

if i was rating on how long it took to get my information, AMEX won. They were quick and looked pretty spot on even though they skewed a little pricier than I asked for. For presentation of the information VISA one out over AMEX. It was easier for me to understand the visa concierge as well. That was because it was during US business hours and I got a native English-speaking person in the US. The American Express concierge I got someone who was native Italian speaking so it was a little more difficult for me to understand however she actually lived in Paris and was very knowledgeable of the neighborhood we were staying in. I’ll give both of them even scores for different reasons.

In the end I’ll give American Express the win since M like the restaurant options. When I called back to book the reservation we wanted to put me on hold to try to reach the restaurant in real time. They were closed. The lady I was speaking to quickly checked and confirmed that there was availability and we could book online. She offered to call back later when they were open to book the reservation directly or to have us book online ourselves. For whatever reason they were unable to book electronically for us. It was trivial for me to make the reservation so I just did it myself.

While I was sorting out the details for dinner in Paris we were also looking for somethingg to do for an upcoming date night in London right before our trip. Having my mom visiting is a huge treat that we can get some date nights and I get to see my mom. It’s been 6 months since we last saw her.. For our London date night M’s local friends gave her several ideas. One of them was Sushisamba. It looked great to me so we wanted to get a reservation. There are online reservation system said they were unavailable night we wanted to go. I figured it was a long shot however I called the concierge folks at American Express to see if they had any special way to get reservations. That is what concierge is known for anyway, right? For this request I only called the American Express people. I will try the VISA people again but for now AMEX seemed to be “get” what we were looking for. When I called the lady I spoke with confirmed that they do have relationships with many restaurants and had fielded several requests in the past for this particular one that we wanted to go to. After some checking unfortunately she was unable to get us a table. Knowing that they could be useful in the future I file that information away.

Since SushiSamba was not available to us we still needed to find a place to go on our date night in London. When we got the recommendations from American Express for the Paris date night they also sent along a PDF. It listed restaurants in Europe where they had special relationships. Each one had some sort of discount or deal through American Express. Looking through that PDF I saved several places that looked really good for us to try at some point around London. I showed M my top three places I liked as date night options and she agreed that my first option would be really cool. It was the bar restaurant at the Savoy hotel, Kasper’s at the Savoy. Now that we had settled on a new destination I went online to try to book a reservation. For the day that we wanted the only offered counter service. For date night I prefer the table so that wasn’t going to work. Our date was not flexible. It was that night or not at all. I then decided to try American Express again. The lady I spoke to this time was not sure if they had a relationship with Kaspar’s. With a little bit of digging she confirmed that they did have a relationship. She was able to get us a table around the time we wanted to go. That was pretty awesome.

I’m writing this before having gone to either of the restaurants we booked through American Express concierge. The overall experience was also extremely positive. That is saying a lot for me since I refuse to even call a restaurant for take away. Let alone trying to help me with specific details of a request. Unless the recommendations turn out to be horrible for some reason I anticipate using them again. I also can’t see how those recommendations could be bad. They gave us the ideas however checking out TripAdvisor both places have fantastic reviews. The fact that they can also get me into a place that I could not get into myself was pretty awesome.

This is one of those things where I’ve known for ages I should be trying yet I didn’t. If I do start using the more I will wonder why I was so lazy over the years when I had it as an option.

You Need A Passport, And You, Every Gets a Passport!

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I am sticking with the title even though I am not sure if the Operah joke goes over well in this context.

The thing about living overseas is you need a passport. M hadn’t renewed her US passport until the summer. It expired sometime last year. We were pleasantly surprised to get the passport back pretty quick versus how long the State Department said it could take.

My passport is good through 2019 however I’m renewing it early. For one thing I look vaguely like the photo on my passport nowadays. It’s almost funny to see how much more weight I had back then. I also think it’s a good idea to renew it now since renewing it while I’m overseas I feel will be more challenging. Since we want to make a trip before we move I sent my request off and paid the expedite fee. Even though MC had hers come back pretty fast there’s no guarantee. I did not want take that chance.

T has a passport however since she got it when she was not yet one it’s expiring the summer. We will likely have to renew it before we go. I think there’s a rule that you’re not supposed to travel if your passport will expire within six months. I’m curious about that however in any event will renew T before we leave.

A and I went one morning this summer to get hers done. I was surprised at how complicated that was for me to go by myself without M. Apparently the governments concerned about people getting passports and taking their kids without telling the other spouse. I needed to provide a notarized letter and proof of ID from MC saying she knows that I’m getting a passport for A. I get the reasons why you have to do this however I was slightly amused, and slightly annoyed that I had to do that. A didn’t really care. She was fascinated with the post office.

Once T is taking care of we will be all set. Next up is the visas. Thankfully work is taking care of those.