Travel

Holiday Plan B

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This was not the post I was expecting to be writing 48 hours ago. To tell this story I have to go back to August. M has to work so I decided to take off term break and take the girls somewhere. My master plan was to take the girls on a cruise out of Southampton for a few days. I was worried about things to do however the ship seemed like there was a ton of options and the girls are generally fine in a pool.

48 hours ago we got an email from our cruise line saying that due to a covid exposure the kids club and a host of activities were going to be closed our sailing. Around the same time others in a group I am in for the ship were sailing on were saying they only let 11 kids in the indoor pool at a time and then they get 10 minutes and they have to get out. Having to queue for 20-30 minutes for one of the few activities they can do was troubling however doable. When Royal Caribbean emailed they gave us 3 options. 1, get some money back and we cruise, 2, a lot of credit for another cruise or 3, all our money back no questions.

Lots of people in the group I was in for the cruise said they were going to bring games and make the best of it. I thought about that. Doing that was doable. My issue was more the fact if we took the credit the amount we would’ve spent on the cruise was way more than I thought we would be getting out of it. With all the restrictions. That I was by myself and not having any kids club to get a break from the girls was a big deal. The fact that Covid was on the boat was is another concern. Talking with M we both agreed that just getting our money back was probably the safest bet.

The girls and I were disappointed. I would rather be disappointed and plan another cruise then go on this and have the girls have a negative feeling towards cruising. The last cruise we did with their grandparents they thought was out of this world fantastic. I thought it was pretty epic also.

I went into back planning mode. The girls love a pool. I figured if I could find a nice hotel with a pool they would be very happy. After looking at several options I settled on one with an indoor pool that did not require any sort of pre-booking the pool. Several I investigated did have that restriction.

So instead of cruising today girls and I start our few days holiday in London. It’s a little odd being able to go home in 40 minutes if we forgot anything however we are settling into hotel life nicely. Our view is pretty awesome also.

As plan B’s go this feels like a winner.

The Story of Our Experience With British Airways

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In February we took a cruise to the Caribbean. It required us to fly from London to Tampa so we could goto Port Canaveral in Florida to get on the boat. We were meeting up with M’s parents. Since we wanted to go to Tampa and not the more popular nearby Orlando international Airport we had limited flight options. The only direct flight from any London airport to Tampa was British Airways out of Gatwick. Anything else would require us to transfer.

Since we moved to London in all of our personal travel to the states we have flown either Virgin Atlantic or Norwegian Airways. This was our first trip as a family on British Airways. I have flow BA before however I can only recall doing so in Business Class. Before we even got on the plane I had a major issue with using BA. There was no way to book a seat ahead of time in regular economy without spending extra money. If you wanted their low-end tickets you would not be able to pick a seat at all. Their standard economy tickets let you pick seats only when you checked in 24 hours ahead of time. As a family with two relatively small kids that’s not good enough. We need the ability to know we are together when we book our tickets. What good is it to be able to select your seats when you may not have been fast enough on the day to get 4 together.

That limitations not only required us to purchase the standard economy tickets. We also had to pay extra per person to pick her seats when I booked the tickets. Both together added several hundred pounds to the ticket price. Virgin Atlantic had no such restriction. If we bought their standard economy ticket I was able to book a seat. The same goes for Norwegian airlines and they are considered a low-cost carrier. This penny/pence pinching is very annoying. All other things being equal I won’t pick British Airways over Virgin, Delta, Norwegian in the future if I can help it. Business practices do matter people.

If that wasn’t enough their entire online check in process had left a lot to be desired. For both legs of the trip we were required to go to the ticket counter to input additional information. This isn’t the first time we as a family have flown internationally. We’ve never had to do this before however when queried we were told that something about our passports required us to see an agent. I just don’t believe that since we’ve done at least three other roundtrips to the states with no issues. In practice the lines weren’t too bad and on the way home they confirmed my TSA Pre was on my ticket so it worked out. It was simply not a seemless experience. The reason I bring it up is the oddity of because of that glitch we were checked into our flight with no boarding passes. I don’t know if that’s a thing for just British Airways or if airlines are now “checking you in” if you don’t even have a boarding pass. Are you really checked in?

What is funny to me is that the actual inflight service was pretty good. M pointed out the good service also. That does not change that before rhe flight even started I went into it with the negative thought in my head because of the extra cost of the seats. I appreciated the good service in the air. All things equal its not enough for me to choose BA again based on my purchase experience. Since I am not a frequent flyer with them it really doesn’t matter to them anyway! As always it does feel a bit theraputic to write about it though.

Photo shown is not the plane we flew on. That is a 747 I flew on going home from London when living in NY and we flew on something less spectacular that that for this trip.

Too Many Choices, What Lounge to Choose?

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Since our move to London we have been flying more. We are taking advantage of our location to see Europe on our holidays. With this travel we have been using one of the credit card perks we have, airport lounge access. With MC and my American Express cards we can each get into Priority Pass lounges and take 2 guests. That means the entire family can get in a lounge without any extra cost beyond what we paid for the annual fee on the card. This benefit alone this year justified the annual fee. The way i calculated that was since we need to get to the airport early for flights especially with the girls. We would get lunch. Lunch was costing us £40-60 pounds. Since we can get food at the lounges i calculated each visit to a lounge to be worth that amount to us. By adding up all the times we used the lounges it works out to be a worthwhile perk.

Before our trip to New York for our summer holiday we debated what airport lounge we should goto. We were flying Virgin out of Terminal 3 at Heathrow. We had flown Virgin in June for our quick trip to NY. That meant we had already gone to a lounge in Terminal 3. We did not know if we should return to the Aspire lounge or somewhere new. In this case the No1 Lounge was our other option.

The girls are now old enough to start providing their opinion on subjects like this. Their opinion was they liked the lounge in Gatwick the best. That feedback was helpful however not in the context of where to go for this trip. That simply meant that anywhere we went in Heathrow would not meet their expectations! M was trying to remember if she liked the Aspire Lounge in Heathrow Terminal 3 or not. I liked it. They had the best breakfast buffet of a lounge we have gone to so far. What won me over, eggs and proper sausages in a buffet.

I had been to the No1 Lounge before. It was when i was by myself for work. I did not stay very long. The wait seemed long at the time so I had a drink and left. It looked nice though.

After more discussion than was likely necessary on the topic we settled for the No1 Lounge. We were curious.

The place was crowded. At first it looked like the lounge would be a total bust. M and I both were asking staff if there was anywhere to sit. Finally someone suggested we sit in the movie room. So we did. It was a nice sized room with chairs that had trays on them to eat off of. They were playing Despicable Me 3 or something. The girls loved it. M and I were happy since at first there was no one in the movie room. It was quiet. We ordered our food. The food came pretty quick. I liked my sandwich. The buffet was pretty good. Overall a huge win. Since they have since asked if they were going back there I think they have a new favorite lounge.

I am glad this is the biggest debate we are having:)

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.