Edith D. Itinerary
Note to self: When planning a trip, I need to remember that if I find a good mileage fare to just book it — even if my plans aren’t totally finalized, even if it’s not exactly what i want. Points flights are usually free to cancel or change, so there’s no harm in grabbing a Plan B ticket while I’m still looking for Plan A.
I have a friend who constantly does this and I even gave her a drag name for it: Edith D. Itinerary. I tease her that she's not really happy unless she makes a substantial change to an upcoming trip at least once a week. I can definitely relate to the dopamine hit of clicking "Buy" on an airline website, so I get it! While I lovingly tease her for doing it too much, I definitely err on the side of doing it too little.
For this year's annual Sydney Mardi Gras trip I changed that, though! For whatever reason (general ennui?) I just didn't get around to booking it until 3 weeks before the trip. Yeah, flying to Sydney during its absolute peak tourist week with basically zero pre-planning. Ugh. But they say the best time to plan a trip is one year out, and the second best time is 3 days from now so off I went…
Tim's new apartment in Sydney is right next to the airport and I'm constantly checking the Flight Radar app to see which planes are going overhead. It's made my "list of planes/flights I'd like to take someday" get vastly longer and it'll be good to check this top-10 one off the list.
I have a friend who constantly does this and I even gave her a drag name for it: Edith D. Itinerary. I tease her that she's not really happy unless she makes a substantial change to an upcoming trip at least once a week. I can definitely relate to the dopamine hit of clicking "Buy" on an airline website, so I get it! While I lovingly tease her for doing it too much, I definitely err on the side of doing it too little.
For this year's annual Sydney Mardi Gras trip I changed that, though! For whatever reason (general ennui?) I just didn't get around to booking it until 3 weeks before the trip. Yeah, flying to Sydney during its absolute peak tourist week with basically zero pre-planning. Ugh. But they say the best time to plan a trip is one year out, and the second best time is 3 days from now so off I went…
Obviously I set a bunch of Seats.Aero alerts, and it rapidly became clear that I would need to route through Brisbane or Melbourne if I wanted a lie-flat seat for under 300k (each way!) I don't mind the stopover, but dang 300k is awful.
I eventually found a great trip home for 90k united points in Polaris Sydney > Melbourne > Los Angeles. But the best I could do for the flight there was SFO > Brisbane > Sydney for 230k. So I booked it and left all of my Seats.Aero alerts active. Lo and behold a week later it found a LAX-SYD flight for 130,000 Qantas (Amex transfer partner) points and it was nonstop from LAX to Sydney with no pesky stopover. Bonus: the seat is upstairs on one of Qantas' A380s, which I've never flown. I flew their 787 from Dallas a while back and to quote myself it's "like United on a good day." The big downer is no Wi-Fi, but since the flight is overnight, it's not that big of a deal.
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| looking forward to flying this bird! |
Tim's new apartment in Sydney is right next to the airport and I'm constantly checking the Flight Radar app to see which planes are going overhead. It's made my "list of planes/flights I'd like to take someday" get vastly longer and it'll be good to check this top-10 one off the list.
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