Booking my flight to the Seychelles in first and business class

Image courtesy of http://www.seychelles.travel

Introduction

I had wanted to book Machu Pichu around Thanksgiving this year, but it turns out November isn’t a great time to go (start of rainy season.)  I’ll plan that for April 2017 or so.  So I wasn’t sure where to go for Thanksgiving.  I considered going back to Bora Bora, but availability is pretty low in getting there.  Since I had also done the Maldives already, I figure the only other beach-type resort area is the Seychelles.  Plus, this is where Prince William and Kate did their honeymoon.  Spoiler – we won’t be staying at the £4,000-a-night villa.  Here’s a map to remind everyone where it is.

 

Hotels

There’s really only 4 chain hotels there.   Let’s cross out the Doubletree, so now I’m down to 3 hotels.  I’m even going to cross out the Meridien since I’m a lowly SPG Gold and get no free breakfast.  Since I have Hilton Diamond this year, the free breakfast is very valuable to me.  This then narrows it down to the Hilton Labriz or the Hilton Northolme.  What you need to know is the Labriz is on its own island in the upper left corner, which I’ll have to pay a $100 ferry round trip per person.  And from what I read on Flyertalk, people who like beaches tend to like the Labriz better.

I asked Trevor over at Tagging Miles who fly way more than me, and he said he had stayed at the Hilton Northolme.  The Northolme seems to be more of a cliff setting than a beach setting.  Regardless, since we’ll be there for 7 nights, I’m going to use an AMEX Hilton card to book 4 nights and get the 5th night free.  That will cost me 70K * 4 = 280K HH points.  I’ll then book 2 nights at the Northolme for 80K per night, so 160K total.  This means I’ll need 440K HH points, and I currently have ZERO points.  This will mean lots of grocery spend!

Image courtesy of Hotel Hustle

 

Getting to the Seychelles

The first thing when booking these big trips is to Wikipedia the airport.  This lets you know who flies to the airport and what alliances and miles you need.  Looking at SEZ, the ones that stand out are Emirates, Etihad, and Air Seychelles.  This meant I could use Alaska miles on Emirates or AA miles on Etihad or even Etihad miles on Etihad/Air Seychelles (Etihad owns 40% of Air Seychelles)

The first option I looked at was using Alaska miles on Emirates since I know Emirates has pretty good availability.  My options were the 1-stop SEA-DXB-SEZ flight in business for 77.5K AS one-way or the SEA-LAX-DXB-SEZ flight in First for 100K AS miles one-way.  Since I had already flown the A380 before, I didn’t want to go out of my way to fly it again.  I especially didn’t want to waste 10 hours of vacation time for flying it again, and so I just booked the fastest route there, which was the SEA-DXB-SEZ flight for 77.5K OW.  That SEA-DXB is only on a 777-200LR since Seatac can’t handle an A380 currently.  From what I hear, first class opens up a week before the flight, so I MIGHT upgrade our 2 seats to first class.  We’ll see what my AS balance will be at the time, and I’ll decide accordingly.  For the 2 of us, that meant 77.5K x 2 = 155K AS miles.

 

Getting back from the Seychelles

Now I could have flown back the same way I came, but I actually only have 300K AS miles when I booked it, so I was 10K AS miles short.  So due to a mileage balance issue, I decided to burn my 800K AA miles instead for the way back.  I looked at SEZ-AUH, and that flight had 5 business class award seats on almost every day.  There is no First class available on that flight (not sure it exists.)  For the record, this 4:35 hr flight costs 30K in coach and 45K in business.  Usually I’m okay with sitting in coach for a 4:30 hr flight, but heck, what’s 30K out of 800K?  If I only had 300K AA miles, then I probably would have done coach.  To give you an idea how screwed up the current AA award chart, from Abu Dhabi all the way to Tokyo is 9 hours and that’s only 45K in FIRST CLASS!

Now that we’ll be landing in AUH at 7pm, I then looked at First availability for 2 people from AUH to LAX,SFO, ORD, AND JFK.  The ORD flight had no availability.  The other 3 flights had these times:

• AUH – LAX EY 171 09:20AM – 14:00
• AUH – SFO EY 183 02:25AM – 06:40
• AUH – JFK EY 101 10:35AM – 16:25 (not A380)

Looking at those 3 flights, I decided to cross out JFK because I didn’t want to deal with a 5 hr domestic flight.  So my only 2 options are LAX and SFO.  In the end, I chose to go with SFO since this meant I didn’t need to overnight in AUH.  We could go out to dinner in AUH and be back at the airport by midnight for our 2AM flight.  So I called up the Australian AA call center and put the award on hold.  The whole itinerary would cost me 90K + 45K = 135K per person one-way.  Definitely not cheap, but better I use it instead of letting it devalue.  Please note that since this was booked as 2 separate segments, I could have spent time in AUH.

I had considered the Qatar/Doha route to save me the 45K miles, but Qatar doesn’t fly to the Seychelles.  I thought about using United miles, but that would have been 3-4 stops for me to get to Seattle.

 

Getting from SFO to SEA

My flight from AUH lands in SFO at 6:40AM.  I figure we’ll spend the day in SFO eating and shopping.  I was then going to buy 2 one-way flights on Virgin America or Alaska to fly back the following night at roughly $100 per person.  Instead of doing that, when I called back AA to book my flight, I asked to add AS OAK-SEA on the following day’s 6:30AM flight.  How glorious is that?  I get 23:50 hrs layover in SFO for free.  I haven’t decided if we’ll fly back on that flight or I’ll book my own one-way flight.  I may still be jetlagged, so waking up at 4AM shouldn’t be a big deal.  I don’t know, we’ll see.

Full itinerary

 

Should have used Etihad miles for SEZ-AUH

When I was telling my buddies about the painful 45K AA miles I spent on the SEZ-AUH one-way, one of them suggested that I should have used Etihad miles.  Sure enough, when I look at the cost using Etihad miles, it’s this:

and in business:

Let’s skip the business seat since like I said, I could endure 4:30hrs in coach.  I could have spent 17K EY miles instead of 30K AA miles for the flight.  Now how do I get 17K EY miles?  Well, they are a transfer partner with Citi TYP.  The same ones that I had transferred out to Singapore for fear of getting the axe.  This is also why my 2 award booking partners are so much better at redemptions than me.  Instead of using 90K AA miles in business, I could have spent 34K TYP + $200 USD in coach.  Dough!

So what did I wind up doing?  I changed my routing to go from AUH-LAX and then LAX-SEA.  I gave myself exactly 1:35 hrs to connect in LAX.  There’s a high likelihood that at least 1 of the 2 flights will have a time change, and if the connection falls below 90 minutes, it’ll be an illegal connection, thus giving me a lever to cancel the flight for free.  Worst case, I’ll just change my LAX-SEA to the next day to give me 24 hrs in LA, which isn’t the worst thing in the world.  I’ll keep you guys posted.