Post Three: Fighting and Flying With United

As many of you know, I fly a lot. Between business and personal travel, I average over 100K miles a year on United alone. So with all this experience, you would think I would understand all the rules and be able to navigate the system. For the most part, I do. The exception comes when I try to book international travel using multiple airlines, and combining award travel with purchased tickets. This trip has been a learning experience.

On the surface, it would seem simple to arrange a trip from SFO to Florence and return. But, because I wanted to use award travel to book Rosey’s ticket, and purchase mine, it became complicated very fast. First, there were no “saver” business class award seats available for travel even though we started to search last October. Of course, there were standard award seats available for redeeming 150,000 miles each way. Total for the trip: 300,000 miles per ticket. Just as a point of reference, a round trip from SFO to NYC is about 5,000 miles. To earn enough miles for a standard business award round trip from SFO to Italy, you have to fly back and forth across the United States 60 times. That’s right, 60 round trips. That’s a lot of time with screaming babies, no food, cramped legs, rock hard seats and delayed flights.

One little perk for flying 100K a year with United, however, is that they give you lots of free drink tickets. The reason is probably so you will imbibe enough to forget that your seat cushion has not been replaced in 20 years. Thank heaven for these drink tickets. Rosey and I plan to use all of them while planted in our economy seats from San Francisco to Chicago to Frankfurt to Florence.

Lesson learned: As soon as you know the destination of any future trip, book your flights. And, even if your chosen airline doesn’t send you free drink tickets, drinks are only $7.00 on the plane. If you ask politely, the flight attendant will even serve you doubles!

Next Post: Heading to SFO for a 6:00 AM flight