Eco-not-me

So, why I really, really hate coach, and want to fly business class? Basically: Airlines keep ratcheting the “economy” experience downward. I look longingly at the photos from 1960’s travel, roomy seats, fresh food, and everyone dressed properly. Those days are gone. Frankly, I’d be willing to live with early 2000’s, in terms of comfort and service.

To be clear, I don’t fault airlines one bit. They work in a free market, one in which consumers have made it increasingly clear that they value price over any other consideration. Airlines will continue the race to the bottom up until such time as consumers vote with their pocket book.

Beware of this, is all I can say. If the last time you flew was 2010, take care in booking, read the fine print – especially on the “basic economy” fares (I hate these fares most of all, since they don’t include seat reservations, making them totally useless for family travel). Prepare for baggage fees, and tighter controls over what qualifies as carry-on.

And be aware of ever-tighter seating. As of writing, most airlines are working on revamping their cabins for their wide-body planes, turning 9-across rows in 777’s to 10-across. Legroom and recline keeps getting smaller as well, to the point where, for short-haul, you can expect no recline at all. Ryan Air pioneered this, with good old British Airways now signing on. Btw, there’s a vocal group of fliers who consider reclining to be rude to recline your seat; personally, with recline being as restricted as it is, it does me no good. Might as well sit upright. That’s a prime example of the above – I’d be willing to knock $20 off my flight for a no-recline seat on a short flight.

If you just can’t tough out the economy cattle-car, then you always have the option of “premium” economy, a relatively new feature. From what I can tell, it’s priced out (factoring in inflation) at levels of the old regular economy – well, yeah, because it’s the same seating as old regular economy. We flew it on the last trip, and I found it to be worthwhile – only complaint from me was that the arm rests were fixed, so the boys couldn’t stretch out across multiple seats.

Again, on this, I come out squarely on the side of the free market. Some may say that Airlines are treating us fliers shabbily, or feeing us excessively, or whatnot, and perhaps even call for government regulation. But from what I can tell, the airlines are giving us what we want: choices, choices, more choices. If the in-flight meal adds $25 to the cost, why wouldn’t you want the option to bring a sandwich of your own instead? Or a blanket? These days, we have more tools than ever to help us plan ahead and know what we’re getting into. And if you’re still confused, feel free to nudge your friendly neighborhood travel blogger. He’s happy to help.

Fare Sale

FYI -- Delta is now offering some sale fares to Europe, if you want to check those out. I'm not shilling for them, I use this example only to illustrate my rule that fares are best purchased 3-4 months out. If you do go to Delta, you'll see that the fares are valid April 2 to May 17, which is...3-4 months out. Useless for us family fliers, I'd love to do France in May, but that's exam time for everyone.

And besides, I'm not looking for economy tickets anyway. Can you tell I'm obsessed with flying business class? Well, that’s what happens when you fly it once. You want to get back.

Airlines don’t make it easy. They don’t need to drop their business class pricing – your average corporation has no problem paying $3,500 R/T to fly an executive overseas (justification: that exec will be productive on day 1 of the trip, as opposed to day 2; I suspect there’s a tax angle, too). So, you may see the occasional “sale” (currently, $2,500 for ATL-London on Delta, usually $3,300). It’s still not useful for most of the rest of us.

Back up here – how did I, under these pricing constraints, ever actually get a business class trip? Ahh, the good old days, when credit card companies were first partnering with airlines to award miles…before they really knew the math on it, and “loyalty” was a key airline concept. They’d find out that loyalty is only useful for a certain subset of business travelers; the rest of us book the cheapest airline, even if it’s just $5 less.

Still, it was the early days, and airline cards were handing out miles in bunches. Huge signing bonuses, plus jaw-dropping mileage multipliers. There was a famous instance of getting 1000 miles on a purchase of a brand of pudding cup. People went wild.

Also, airlines though that transparency was helpful. Delta had a published award chart, and darn it, getting to those award levels was pretty easy. For the 2010 trip my wife and I took, I think I spent 160,000 miles for the two of us, business class. Heck, I got nearly half of that just by signing up with the card.

Airlines have since learned to be stingier with their miles. You can still get decent award sign-ups, but from there…ok, take Delta. In 2010, see above, the award amount for business class to Europe was 40,000 miles per leg. And it was on a clear chart. Sure, they had limited availability, you had to book, like, 11 months out, but it was there.

In between then and now, Delta added tiering on their award inventory (there were some scattered 40,000 seats, but most were 55,000, or 80,000); pulled the award chart (now you didn’t know what their lowest, or base level was); started devaluing the miles annually. The current low-price I can find? 70,000 miles one-way (ATL-London, if you’re curious). In 8 years, they’ve nearly doubled the mileage requirement, amounting to an effective compounding inflation of 8% per year. The Consumer Price Index over that time is less than 2%. Insult to injury is that last year the base rate was 62,500. They upped it over 10% between 2017 and 18 alone!

The upshot – saving up your miles for a business class trip is tougher and tougher. Sure, my Delta miles don’t expire, but they become less and less valuable every day. I have to pile in a ton on every year just to keep my miles at purchasing power parity. 

Well, that’s less than helpful. So, for the fun of it – if you still want in, or, at least want to see if Business Class is worth your money, do the following. Get a Delta Gold Amex, shuttle everything through it that first year (I’m not advocating carrying a balance: just use it for whatever you can pay off; and avoid the purchases where you have to pay an interchange fee, typically 3%, for making the purchase). Then, make a handy referral for the card to your spouse. In year two, shuttle your spend through that card. You’ll get miles for the referral.

By the time you’re done, two years in, you *should* have enough miles for two one-way tickets in business. That’ll at least get you a taste. And, btw, you don't have to get a Delta Amex, you can do the same strategery with any travel card/airline partnership. I checked -- a plain United card gives you 40,000 in the first year for signing up, and they do post their award travel chart. 70,000 per one-way business class. You can get two of those in 3-4 years. 

OK, what about the way back? Used to be, airlines would soak you on a one-way, so this scheme didn’t work. Not anymore! Norwegian will happily sell you a one-way at regular discounted price. Southwest does it, too. So, for example, book your outbound flight Atlanta-London using your Delta miles (140,000 total for two; you may have to pay $10 in taxes), then fly coach back to New York on Norwegian for $434; grab the $98 flight from New York to Atlanta. All in? $1,074 for the flights. Now, the Amex card will have an annual fee, $95, but it’s waived the first year. So, maybe add $100 to the above. Call it $1,200 all-in. Not bad, for a 50% business class itinerary. Sure, it took you two years to build up, but I’d say it’s worth the effort. Just don't complain if it totally ruins coach for you.

So, Where Ya Gonna Stay? Part 2

After my last post on Euro rentals, a Dear Reader (thank you R) seconded my opinion that Europeans tend to book their vacation rentals very far in advance. But: you didn’t think we here at BHMTravelDad were going to just leave it at that, did you? You, Dear Reader, are certainly wondering: did I book in haste? At the risk of engendering some serious buyer’s remorse, I’m going to revisit the topic, to see if, had I waited until now, would I still be able to find a nice rental in the Loire? Would I, perhaps, even find a better one?

So, I reran my Loire Valley searches on Airbnb and VRBO. Rather quickly I was able to recognize some of the other favorites we had on the original short list. Clearly there hasn’t been a huge amount of booking activity in the last few months. I did a further test: I searched for rooms first, with my specific dates; second, with no dates at all. The comparison told me that about 60% of all available places had already been booked. That seems like a pretty high number to me (I’m not getting the best locations anymore) but, there’s clearly enough inventory still there for a good stay.

Now, I’m also finding a few places that I didn’t see before that I think may be nice. Note I’m not doing a deep dive, but keep in mind that inventory does get added, either through cancellations, or new property additions. I see a couple that are coming in maybe 15% cheaper than the one I booked. Again, not doing a deep dive into each spot, maybe these places are still rejects, but my current ruling: I had no need to book as early as I did. 

Because we’re thorough here at BHMTravelDad – you, Dear Reader, deserve that – I decided to research just a bit further. Specifically: I went back and revisited the Black Forest. Recall back in 2016, when I searched 4 months out, that I found no (!) suitable rental apartments still available. None. What does it look like now?

Well. For dates in June, I’m coming up with, oh, maybe a half dozen that still look pretty good. And, same as with the Loire, my blank date check test shows the area is about 60% booked. The cream of the crop may be gone, but there’s still a lot left to choose from.

But wait! June is still 5 months out. How about availability for, say, three months out? Fair enough. Let’s say you found a discounted Flight to Paris for Spring Break; good news, as far as I can tell, you’ll still have plenty of Loire Valley inventory to choose from. The same seems to hold for the Black Forest. Sure, maybe these are off-peak for those locations, but on the whole, I’m ready to say that there’s enough inventory in all the major vacation destinations to keep you from having to worry about booking too far ahead. It may be that the sheer number of available rentals has increased these past two years, that’s plausible. 

Summary: I think you’re still better off with my original strategy, which is to concentrate on air fares ahead of lodging. I’ll check this theory again when summer fares go on sale, but right now, I’m thinking I didn’t need to buy my lodging as early as I did.

Have I hurt myself by doing so? Now that doesn’t look likely, yet – it’s possible that there’ll be a seriously discounted business class fare sale, lower than I’ve ever seen. But not likely. It’s also possible La Compagnie will re-offer their $1,100 R/T fare, in which case I’m our $300/ticket. I’m also going to call this unlikely. I’m comfortable where I am right now – and we had some very good reason for choosing our destination already – but next trip, I may revert to my previous strategy of letting the airlines bid for my vacation.

So, Where Ya Gonna Stay? Part 1

To repeat – I’m doing all of this backwards to my previous methods of travel. As recently as last year, I would have scanned for airfare pricing first, found a good flight to one of my perpetual “hot” destinations, and worked from there. A few minutes on Google would show that my current best bet is Spring Break in Stockholm: $700 R/T from BHM (!), with only a 2 hour layover in Chicago. This is a deal, and I bet Stockholm in March is a (frozen) delight. Plus, I love cross-country skiing. I’m feeling some slight regret at not getting in on this.

But the idea here was that I’ve pre-selected France. I had to roll the dice with the flights, because once I made the France choice, I decided lodging became paramount. I had this view colored by my 2016 experience with booking a vacation apartment in the Black Forest; I started that process 4 months out, only to find that *all* of the reasonable places (that is, large enough to fit four adults and two kids) had long since been booked. We were left with the usual hotel options – not complaining too much, the Hotel Lamm we ended up in was perfectly fine – but this year, I was not going to have the same happen.

Anyway: starting with Airbnb and VRBO (why not checkout both, after all), I identified about a dozen reasonable places in the Loire Valley that could accommodate us (this was back in October, btw). It helps to use Advance Search tools to really spell things out, like the need for 2+ bathrooms, and a kitchen, and (most importantly) a washer/dryer. Airbnb & VRBO both list out amenities very well (including the number and sizes of the beds), along with photos and reviews. And, you can usually get the address of the place, or general location – use Google Streetview to scope out the neighborhood. You don’t want a power plant in your back yard. By the end of the refining process, I had about three places that I would say were suitable for us. 

Viewed from that perspective, I’m glad I booked back when I did: If you only have three *great* places to choose from nine months out, what are the chances that all of those would still be around four months later? At the time, I judged it to me slim. 

Thrown in, btw, was an annoying little feature from Airbnb and VBRO that essentially said “16 other people are considering this location for your dates,” and “75% of places in your search area are already booked out for your dates.” Recognize these for what they are: marketing tools to get you nervous about missing out. Book now, or else! Still, having found a good place at a reasonable price, I booked.

Listen, you can second guess all your choices - or you can take the plunge. I want to be smart, I want to be frugal...I want to have a nice vacation. Our rental apartment is (appears) perfect for us, I’ll leave it at that.

Christmas Travel, Part 2

OK, the picture book I made was nice, but the real gift for my family for Christmas this year were airline tickets. Now these were a bit unusual, so let me explain…

…as I’ve previously mentioned, most international flights don’t go on sale until 3-4 months from departure date. There are occasional hiccups further out than that, but go ahead and check it out – run a Google Flights search, oh, Atlanta to Paris. You’ll notice you can snag a $653 R/T flight right up through April; fares go up in May. Some of the reason is seasonality, for sure, but I bet dollars to donuts that, if you check again in February, you’ll see $600+ R/T for June and July.

BTW, on a previous post I also mentioned Turkish Air, they’re the ones behind the $653 fare. It’s a nice bargain, but makes it an 18 hour trip. No-Can-Do. Virgin is trying to copy it ($760 or so) but you’re laying over nine (!) hours in London. Fine, you can take a shuttle into the city for a few hours, they have that; and in my younger travel days I had a marvelous 5 hour layover at Heathrow, having sidled up to a bar and gone down the on-tap selection one-by-one. But that’s a lifetime and two kids ago. It’s definitely not a family friendly travel itinerary.

Anyway, by any rights I should have no business buying a ticket now for summer travel. Best I could do, which I’ve done before, is plan for travel over Spring Break. Perfectly good choice, but it limits your potential destinations. Anything north of the Alps/Pyrenees is dismal in late March – think 45 and rainy. You could do Paris, London, or major city destinations, but the countryside is still slumbering. And since we’d decided go to the French countryside in particular, am I not overpaying?

Possibly. But just because airfares *generally* don’t go on sale before 4 months out, doesn’t mean they might not at a specific moment. In particular, I’d been regularly checking the fares for La Compagnie, a boutique airline that flies between Newark and Paris. I’ve mentioned them before – they fly an all-business class 757 at a cut rate. Granted, it’s not 2018-level business, like United’s Polaris. It’s more 2008. The seats are *almost* lie-flat (175 degrees, they say).

The kicker is that the fares are a pretty good fraction of full business class fares. Sample: Delta One, New York to Paris, typically runs $3,300. Time it right and you can get down to $2,500. Multiplied over a family of four? $10,000 to get you across the pond in style, and just let that number sink in.

Now, La Compagnie. Their fares start at $1,800; already you have a $700 savings built in. I’ve seen, on special occasions, them offer $1,100 R/T. Very limited time and selection on those, from what I found; so, when doing my periodic check on pricing, I saw them go to $1,400 for our June dates, I locked it in.

So, on the one hand: I’m saving $1,100 on a business class ticket; I can’t (yet) imagine that the La Compagnie business class is $550/leg worse than Delta’s. You’re still in a plane, after all. I’m betting that it’s pretty darn close. That’s a good deal; really, I'm just shooting for that sweet spot where the flight is juuuust comfortable enough that we can reasonably sleep for 5 hours. Anything over that is almost a waste.

On the other hand: I could have dragged us to Paris, coach, for something like $600 from Newark. I’m paying an extra $800/person. $3,200 for a family of four. Now, think of what you can do with that kind of money. Like, spend three nights in a crazy fancy hotel in Paris – say, the George V – and still have change left over.

It’s where you value the money. Is the pain of flying coach so bad that you’re willing to trade off some really nice things to avoid it? That’s not an easy argument to make, but it’s possible. And, anyway, this was a Christmas present, remember?

The side problem is that the business class ticket is wasted on our to-be ten y.o. kids – they don’t need the space or the service (read: booze) that you get in Business. But, they’re still too young to fly by themselves back in coach, so we got to bite the bullet, for them. That will change when they’re…12? At that point I’ll be happy to let them fend for themselves while I travel up front. By 12, the airlines don’t really even consider you an Unaccompanied Minor, you’re expected to manage the flight alone.

The other side problem is that I have to still get the family from Birmingham to Newark. Yeesh. That’ll add another $300/person to the event, and it’s proving to be more challenging than I thought. More on that later. 

Christmas Travel, Part 1

I hear tales, and no doubt based on some actual truth, of families who really, really give travel for Christmas. As in, everyone packs their bags – maybe one warm weather bag, one cold weather bag, and then Christmas morning, the destination is revealed. They’re on the plane that afternoon.

Hey, it’s exciting, and it can work – Christmas Day flights are often discounted, plus you have a solid week before the kids are back in school. Perhaps someday I’ll try this approach. The problem I see with it is, I think it’s much more fun to know where you’re going, and properly prepare for it, than to be surprised and whoosh, off you go. I suppose some destinations don’t really need prep – like, a beach resort or a ski lodge – but, come on, if you’re going to a cultural destination, you want to enjoy the specific run-up to that trip.

That doesn’t mean I don’t give travel for Christmas. This year, I gave the family as their main presents two travel-related products. I’ll get to the second in the next post, but the first one is one I’m really quite proud of, it may be the best actual physical object I’ve ever produced -- click on the photo and you'll see the picture book I created for our 2016 trip:

Sure, I’ve done plenty of photo books, so have you; they’re easy now. The Shutterfly algorithms can put it all together for you pretty well, if you want, just upload your photos. But this? Thanks to my running travel blog from the last trip, I was able to meld the photos together with an actual detailed description of our activities. That Germany trip was only 18 months old, but there were specifics we’d already forgotten, since not everything has a picture to go against it.

So – on your next big trip – you don’t have to blog, but do take a few minutes at the end of each day and summarize what you did, and equally importantly, how you felt about it. The latter is the kind of stuff future readers, yourself or otherwise, will want to know. Then, add it to your photo book.

Adding the text turned out to be tricky. I myself had so much writing that spacing, editing, and formatting became an issue; perhaps my future efforts will be more spare. I tried several different services to make this work – initially, I thought I could do it all in Word and then upload it to a book print service (Blurb was what I was working with). That didn’t work out, every upload would reformat the doc slightly and shift all the embedded photos. This ended up in many hours of reformatting, and frustration, before capitulation.

Your local print shops can handle these, as long as you don’t mind cheaper binding. I wanted sturdy book binding and covering, so that was out.

I ended back at Shutterfly, since I’m familiar with that tool, and the end product (that is, the pictures need to come out well). My original vision was to embed photos in the text, but I mostly abandoned that, too difficult in Shutterfly. And there were other quirks on formatting that needed to be overcome; not the least is planning it all out to make the texts and photos more or less match. Lastly, their text editing is cumbersome: a good deal of punctuation didn’t get copied over from the original Word document, so the text is rife with typos. I went over it several times, but still managed to miss more than a few apostrophes and dashed. Oh well. I’m still proud of the end result.

Taking notes is also a great evening activity (ask everyone in your travel group, for example, to tell their favorite part of that day). You don’t need to be Sven Hedin here, but you’ll be surprised at how much you miss if you do photos alone.

2018 Hot Travel Destinations, Part 2

Now that that’s out of the way…

…go to the same place every time? Not likely! We love too many things about too many places; and, not for nothing, we want to expose our boys to varied experiences (fine, within the relatively limited confines of Western Europe – when Elon Musk works out his rocket-plane and can get me to Tokyo in 45 minutes, I’m there, but not before, it’s just too dashed far away). There are noticeable differences between a Swedish vacation and an English one.

An English one! England is a perpetual “hot” choice. Cheaper currency (thank you, Brexiteers); steadily improving food (thank you, French tax exiles); great flight options (thank you, Norwegian Air). British Airways even started up a direct connection between London and New Orleans: this does us in Birmingham no good, but it’s a sign of how popular England is as a destination. England is high up on our Hot Pix list.

But so is…Madrid! Outside of the obvious fact that I work for a Spanish company, and could tap into some of those resources, Spain is a darling destination. It’s even warm enough to visit in Spring, as opposed to Summer – that means lower prices. Throw in a few days in Portugal and you’ve really got something.

It all makes me feel like each trip is becoming one of those Olympic bid/award situations, minus the bribes and dancing girls. Who wants to host the Grays? Make your case! In 2014 and 2016, cheap flights really helped dictate our decisions. Milan was, and remains, a great connection from Atlanta. ATL-MXP fares are consistently cheaper than others – London, Paris, Frankfurt – partly due to lower gate fees that MXP charges the airlines. I jumped at a parcel of $600 NYC-Milan tix back in 2014, before anyone had head of “basic economy”.

And, in 2016, Turkish Airlines was trying to make inroads into the trans-Atlantic market, which disrupted a couple of routes. Turkish Air said, “fly through Istanbul, it’ll only take you 12.” They then offered (and still do) really cheap fares to entice fliers. Not our thing, frankly, that’s a long connection (it puts Tokyo in play), but computer flight pricing algorithms kicked in in a few locations to drive down pricing, notably at the time, ATL-ZRH: $900 in Economy Plus, score! I suspect the algorithms have gotten smarter since then.

Anyway, Britain, Ireland, Iberia, Scandinavia, Central Europe, Greece, Croatia…all these places will perpetually remain “hot” destinations until they prove me otherwise. I hope to get to all of them, and I’ll be scanning Google Flights to see which has a cheap flight.

But this year? It’s France. Paris; Loire Valley; Brittany; all over two weeks. I can hear some groans of disapproval – isn’t this a tired choice? “Nobody goes there anymore, it’s too crowded.” Sure, Loire in June will be loaded with tourists. Doesn’t that tell you something? No place can coast indefinitely on reputation alone; France delivers the goods, consistently.

Now, you’re not going to “discover” some hidden gem of a bistro, or a secluded vineyard no one knows about. It’s all on Yelp. Give that dream up, this is well trodden turf. What you will get? Refinement – care in food, in décor, in architecture, rivalled probably only by the Japanese. Who do not make wine, so there’s that.

Listen, my boys will soon be 10. At some point, and better sooner than later, they have to learn what’s good in life. "Son, this is velvet not velveteen. A gentleman must know the difference." We’re going to Paris/Loire/Brittany, the flight situation will just have to work itself out.