Air Travel Discussions
In a 2010 domestic trip, I agreed to be bumped to a flight the next day, and took the option of a $600 voucher for travel on United. A condition of the voucher was that it had to be used on United-operated flights, which wouldn't get me all the way to Berlin; the United itineraries would call for a codeshare, generally on Lufthansa, for the last segment. So I was making plans to apply the voucher to a trip to Munich (a destination I consider preferable to Frankfurt), then purchase a separate ticket (usually looking at Air Berlin) to Berlin. I was thinking I could connect (allowing a reasonable layover) on my arrival day on the outbound, then have a couple of days in Munich on the return.
I then learned from FlyerTalk that there is a way around the restriction of using the voucher only for UA-operated flights. Book a
fully refundable ticket on a route that's available for a little more than the value of the voucher (it can have nothing to do with the route that I plan to take), then cancel and apply the funds to the trip I want, which can include codeshare segments.
For a dummy reservation, a fully refundable Kansas City-Cincinnati trip was a little more than $600. The voucher required phone rather than online booking. The phone reservations system is automated, working with voice recognition, and I didn't find any menu options that provided for the voucher. I went to gethuman.com to learn how to get to a person, and got through to an operator, likely in a distant country. I had them hold the reservation; since I was going by Kansas City airport, as I always do when going to the city, I arranged to exchange the voucher there rather than mail it, which in my view would call for the trouble of certified mail.
I got to the airport and made the exchange at the ticket counter. The agent said there was a lower fare that would let me keep one of the vouchers (they were actually four $150 vouchers). I asked if that was refundable as I wanted, and he said yes. I took that; when I got the receipt, and saw the term "NONREF"; I went back and asked him about it; he said "You wanted a refundable fare?" and went back, taking needless time to make the change to the previously quoted fare for this trip that I had no intention of taking, while there were people behind me in line apparently needing to make a change to get onto a flight that was about to take off.
When I got home, I called up my confirmation code on the United site, and it didn't come up. It called for using the code and my last name; I looked at the receipt, and they had misspelled my name. I called to get that fixed. This was in early December, and I needed to figure out when to book the Berlin trip for May. The fare was hovering around $1000; aside from generally needing to decide whether to go ahead with the trip as planned, I wanted to see if low fares turned up in January, as sometimes happens. For low season, there had been options of a fare of $750, or $150 in new money; I thought for my first trip there I should go in better weather, and May looked good.
Although lower, possibly mistake, fares were sometimes showing for other airlines, I wasn't seeing any change for United as I was committed to take, and people were saying not to expect to see particularly lower fares this year. Then on Kayak, which I usually rely on to tap into the airline sites, United's fare was getting higher. My first instinct was to wait in the hope that they would go down some, but then I went to United's site and found itineraries where the fare hadn't gone up. When I see a fare that's gone up on one site but is still available on another, that's when my instinct says it's time to book.
When my dummy ticket to Cincinnati was booked and I was able to call it up on the site, I had been able to go through the steps of changing to the other itinerary online, with them quoting the fare difference without a change fee, and I stopped short of confirming it. This may have been when my name was misspelled; every time I tried afterwards, I got an error message, perhaps because there had been too many interventions on my record. So anyway, I needed to phone to get this itinerary confirmed; the agent said some of their systems were down and they needed to do some of the process manually. She also quoted a $150 change fee; I questioned that, with the previous ticket having been refundable, and she got that fee removed; I have this trip booked with $350 of new money.
I had been looking for itineraries connecting in Chicago rather than Washington Dulles on the U.S. side, and Munich rather than Frankfurt on the German side. I was able to use Chicago in both directions, but getting the lower fare required connecting in Frankfurt on the outbound. On the return, I was able to connect in Brussels, which has a slightly lower tax and I think is an easier airport. All connecting times are comfortable; I extended the trip by a day rather than have a too-tight connection in Frankfurt on the return.
So I have this trip booked; I'd been interested for some time in getting to Berlin, and when I got the voucher on United, with their many flights to Germany, I thought this would be a good occasion. When I learned about the way to use the voucher on codeshares, I could have considered the option to use the voucher to go to Italy with more options than United's Washington-Rome flight. It was certainly something to consider especially with the chance of going with a companion, but for now it feels right to do this Berlin trip this year, and have a good, fulfilling Italy trip in 2012.
Outbound Flight
For my flights, having gotten a United credit card after booking this trip, I made a purchase to get some of the extra miles for using the card on United, of Premier Travel Plus, giving me the extra legroom of Economy Plus on the transatlantic flight and access to the airline lounge at Chicago O'Hare airport. (After the trip, I had a terrible problem getting the full promised bonus miles for this purchase, described in a
postscript on my blog.) I expected to get the boarding pass for my Frankfurt-Berlin flight on Lufthansa when I did online check-in, but I was not able to get it online or at Kansas City airport.
Resuming this once I've arrived in Chicago (decent flight, full, a little early in arrival), I got to the Red Carpet Club and asked the agent there about the Lufthansa BP. He said it was a roll of the dice to get it, but it printed.
OK, to report on the flights: I had Economy Plus on the United flight from Chicago to Frankfurt. This gave extra legroom, just the way Economy should be. On the inside aisle, I still needed to get up for people in the middle seats. I ordered wine for both pre-dinner and dinner, making one credit card payment. Dinner: choice of chicken or pasta, I took the cannelloni. Maybe from too much wine, I didn't get much sleep. There was a bumpy landing. At the gate, after going through the jetway we needed to climb stairs, and there was a board listing just a few connecting flights, probably those that passengers on this flight had. We seemed to be mingling (that is, in the same area rather than segregated) with departing passengers for non-Schengen flights. The basic advice in Frankfurt is to know the gate numbers and follow the signs. With both my arriving and connecting flights in the A gates of Terminal 1, it meant going to one end of the concourse, clearing passport control, and going downstairs to the Schengen gates. I seemed to enter security in the same area as originating passengers. In my sleepless state, I didn't follow my routine of locking my wallet in my carry-on, I sounded the alarm, and got a pretty intense frisking; I'm supposed to be comforted that these agents are more professional than the TSA. I got to my gate for Berlin, and it went pretty efficiently on that flight, scheduled for 65 minutes, but 45 minutes in the air.
Return Flight
The next week, on the return: After the early-morning bus ride, I found my way to Terminal D and checked in with no wait for my 6.40 a.m. Brussels Airlines flight from Berlin to Brussels. Security was just opening. The agent went through my shoulder carry-on, which had many wires to decipher. I'd taken things out and moved them to my checked bag to better meet the 6-kilo carry-on limit. I was about the last to board, crossing the tarmac, since I didn't hear a general boarding call before the last call. That flight was listed as a regional jet when I booked it, but they changed it to an A319 with lightly padded seats to improve the pitch. There was no SeatGuru chart of that aircraft to check against the seat they assigned me. I found that it was in the back row, in a windowless window seat, but the plane was sparsely occupied and I moved to an empty row in front of another empty row, so I could recline without guilt. They charged for all drinks including water; unusually for a short flight, they had a flight progress map TV monitor; I rested through the flight, and it arrived a few minutes before the scheduled time of 8.
I've been through Brussels Airport a few times, the last in 2000, and it looks largely rebuilt. I arrived at Schengen Concourse A, and followed signs to Concourse B, through retail areas, and finally a narrow passageway with no wait to passport control for exiting Schengen. Then I joined with originating passengers for the security check including shoe removal.
I went to the United transit desk because I thought the boarding passes that Brussels Air gave me must be incomplete, since they didn't include the group numbers that I know the UA passes to have. The agent there said no, they'd stopped having those because they were harmonizing their process with Continental; I remembered reading that today would be "Customer Service Day One." They would just be boarding by rows. Then when boarding time was close (this was a 3-hour layover) they called my name among people who still needed to go to the transit desk, because I'd missed answering questions about the bag that was connecting.
With that resolved, I got my outside aisle seat in regular Economy on this 767 to Chicago, walking past the First Class pods and some rear-facing Business seats. I courteously waited to see that no one else was taking that storage space, and put my bulky shoulder bag in the overhead bin, giving me better legroom. I took the chicken meal choice and got a decent amount of sleep through the 9-hour flight. The long flight listed an oddly precise arrival time of 1.17, and it arrived a few minutes early. There was a short wait at passport control, a longer one for my bag, and I was waved through customs and dropped my bag off. Then the train from O'Hare International Arrival Terminal 5 to Terminal 1.
Then the line for security; I was worried that the TSA might have a problem with my boarding pass that said O'Hare to International, instead of Chicago to Kansas City, but I got through. I got in the left-hand security line when I saw that the checkpoint had a walk-through metal detector on the left and a body scanner on the right. I was still directed to the body scanner and opted out. There was a short wait for a pat-down officer, who was courteous to the extent possible and let me face my belongings.
That pat-down/groping was still not so pleasant, and I was glad that, in my spree of United buying, I'd bought a day pass for the Red Carpet Club. I got there, in the C concourse, after taking the underpass. It was still over three hours before my next flight, and I was glad to settle in with a drink and take advantage of the included wi-fi. I left at around 4.30 to get a cheeseburger at the Billy Goat concession, and went to my gate at the end of the concourse. There was a note on the screen about looking for volunteers to be bumped. I thought momentarily about asking for it as the beginning of a future trip, as this one started with a bump, but I didn't ask, and boarding began. The two seats next to me were empty after boarding, so presumably they wouldn't have finally bumped me, and someone else took one of the seats to have an empty seat next to him. That flight went well and arrived early.
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