the REAL mile high club
no, it's got nothing to do with shenanigans in the airplane bathroom.
as most of you know, i fly a lot these days. even in college, i flew to florida too many times. all of my credit cards are united credit cards. so, at this point, i have a lot of miles.
a little while back, stefan max and i decided to go to japan for chinese new years. we haven't seen each other in ages, so it would be nice. also, i could go see japan, which i've wanted to do for ages.
we spent a while discussing the best dates to go. he's in mongolia (14 time zones away) doing hippy stuff (hippy != internet access), so communication can be difficult to say the least. after a while (two days ago), we decided on dates to go.
assuming the worst case couldn't be too bad, i told him to go ahead and get tickets, and i would get whatever i could to match. i called up my company's secretary and asked her to investigate. she wrote me an email back saying the cheapest she found were 6500RMB (about $1000).
yikes.
i asked her to try other airports, other connections, etc. flying to hong kong is cheap and easy, so i could easily fly there and use another ticket to fly to japan.
bad news, she responded. it's impossible, because of the chinese holiday (traffic), to go anywhere else to fly out, and just as expensive. and while we were contemplating, the ticket prices went up.
well poop.
so i decided to look online a bit myself. after almost two hours of searching, the cheapest tickets i found were $4,500. so i called united. i figured i'm a premier flier, and they'd got to give me some slack. i've got 140,000 miles. that's got to count for something, right?! so i asked christine how much it would cost me, in addition to the miles, to get these tickets.
20,000, she answered. WHAT?! you mean the ticket prices went up that much?!
no no no no. 20,000 miles! plus taxes of course (that's where they really getcha).
so i'm flying to japan for $43.09!! i can't believe it! woooo!
(i need to take two days off work, so this is all pending my boss' approval. i already reserved the tickets. but i just can't believe how great this is!)
comments:
Does everything you touch also turn to gold? :-P
kate | January 1 @ 11:10am
THAT...is a happy story. DOn't you love it when things like this happen?
klcomp | January 5 @ 10:56am