I’m Going to Barcelona!

I’m going to Barcelona!

For a while I’ve had way too many Frequent Flyer miles with United Airlines. It was making me a bit nervous, because I know that either United will go out of business, or decide that it’s lowly loyal customers don’t deserve such luxuries as free flights. Especially now that you can get miles for anything, including using your credit card, I assume that Mile Inflation has to happen soon, and they’ll be worthless. So I decided to use as many miles, as soon as possible.

But if you actually try to use your miles to go anywhere interesting, you’ll soon find that every time you try to look up a travel date, you will get the message “Date not available” for pretty much every day you look at which is less than a year away. This is really frustrating.

Enter AwardPlanner. It’s a website that’s basically a travel agent that will use your frequent flyer miles to book your flights, (as well as regular paid travel if you want.) The price to have them work for you is a little steep: $100 for a year of their service. They used to have a fee of $40 for one trip, but in the past month they seem to have stopped offering that. Anyway, a trip to Barcelona in April (when I wanted to go) is at least $1000, or $2000 for Business class, so to me $100 didn’t seem so bad if they could get me a roundtrip to Barcelona for only miles. Especially since I couldn’t manage to do it myself. One caveat: they don’t guarantee anything: even after you pay them $100 they might not find you a flight only on miles.

Anyway in the end the nice lady “Janet” got me a beautiful roudtrip itinerary from San Francisco to Barcelona, using only my United miles. First class domestically, and Business class transatlantic. In addition to these great accomodations, she also booked a 3-day stopover in Virginia so I can attend my cousin’s wedding on the way back. It’s possible I could’ve figured out how to book such a complicated itinerary using my miles myself, but I really don’t think I could’ve. I also know I wouldn’t have had the patience to wait with United on hold for as long as it would’ve taken.

So come April, I’ll be in Barcelona for about 11-12 days. My tour guide and gracious host will be my friend Anna, who was a housemate for about 3 months when she was a visiting student in Baltimore. It’ll be great to see her again. Here she is on the 4th of July, embracing America after years of being a self-described extreme America-skeptic. Actually that’s probably a nicer way of putting it than she self-described herself, but it’s ok because she seemed to have a good time and come away knowing that a few of us are actually pretty nice. So now I’ll be able to better appreciate her country, and learn all the wonderful things about Catalunya. (She is “not Spanish but Catalan!”)

In addition, it will be a real post-post-graduate vacation. I had a blast for 4 or 5 days in Mexico for my friend Marcel’s wedding, but I think getting away for almost two weeks is necessary to fully reward myself for escaping grad school. It’s almost like I’m some kind of adult now, what with the travelling and enjoying myself! I can’t wait.