A (hopefully not) Once-in-a-Lifetime Flight Experience to Taipei

I started packing over the weekend for our trip to Taipei and Hong Kong and this was the first time I have done so without a detailed list, so we will have to see how much stuff we forgot.  I had to teach a class at TAC and got home around 11:30 on Tuesday, did some final packing and then packed up the car with the luggage and the girls and set off for Narita at 12:38.  We had two carry-on sized suitcases, a small Maclaren stroller and each of us carried a backpack. Or, more accurately, we carried the girls backpacks for most of the time.

Aided by the lack of traffic due to the holiday, we made it to the airport at about 1:30 and were met by the parking company at the departure gate after having some communication difficulties.  We had made a reservation for them to come pick up our car at our departure gate, and my 10+ months of Japanese lessons really came in handy as I tried to talk to the agent on the phone.  From our end, it sounded like this: "Becherer-san. Hai (translation: yes.) Arriving, Narita. Parking. BECHERER-SAN. Reservation. Hai.  Nihongo wakarimasen (translation: I do not understand Japanese). Ummm does anyone there speak English?" It was really frustrating, only because we specifically used this company because they advertise that they speak English.  Eventually we somehow reached an understanding and they found us at our gate.

We checked our two bags at the Cathay Pacific First Class check-in, which was empty, and headed straight through security and customs, neither of which had a wait. 

Moms get a pass to wear leggings and sneakers, right?

Lizzy smiles like her cousin Eddie

Excited to be at the airport

We went to the Cathay Pacific First and Business Class lounge where Lizzy eagerly handed the attendant her lounge invitation card.  The lounge was fine, but nothing special, and had some sushi, instant noodles (which were actually really good), sandwiches, cookies, crackers, soft drinks, alcohol and ice cream. There were only two other people in the lounge when we arrived just before 2:00 so we moved to the back corner and took over a small area with four seats.  The girls just had some cereal for a quick lunch before we left, so they spent 45 minutes eating a bit of everything at the lounge.  Annie really liked the cookies which Delta also serves and kept saying "I feel like I've had these somewhere before!" 

Lounge food

One of her "modeling poses" 

Blowing on noodles for the baby birds

They both loved the instant noodles

Lizzy was starting to become restless so Joe headed towards the gate around 3:00 for our 3:55 flight.  I followed with Annie about ten minutes later.  Both of us noticed on the couple hundred meter walk to the gate how much more aggressive the people were towards the girls.  We are used to people sometimes politely asking to take pictures of the girls, but it definitely felt different in this environment.  Joe had a lady block the stroller with Lizzy in it so she could get close up pictures and pinch her cheeks.  Neither Lizzy nor Joe liked that.  In the gate area, many people were loudly yelling "Baby" and snapping their fingers as the girls passed, which was odd.

No joke, this guy ran after me as I was getting on the moving walkway to get a picture of Annie

The gate agent took the stroller to gate check it, and "travel expert" Joe realized about 90 seconds later that his and Lizzy's passports and tickets were in the stroller.  I pretended I didn't know him and proceeded with boarding. What is this, amateur hour?  They got them back a few second later because the stroller was just at the desk, but that could have been a real problem. We were the first to board and Lizzy sprinted down the ramp to the plane entrance.

The very friendly workers greeted us and walked Annie and me to our seats in First Class.  Joe asked them if he and Lizzy could quickly look at the First Class cabin before they went upstairs to their seats.  They said no problem since Annie and I were the only ones sitting up there for the flight today. 

The flight was delayed by about 30 minutes due to engine problems.  It was no problem for me but Lizzy was a handful, and I will let Joe interject for a bit about his time upstairs in Business Class with Lizzy.

Lizzy kept asking why there were stairs on a plane as we headed up to our seats in 90A and 90K.  Since there was no one up there yet, the workers allowed her to wander around, so she checked out the galley area, some storage and the seating area.  We were told that it was a light load today, so we had the back area of nine seats all to ourselves and could use them however we wanted.  We ending up using five of them for sitting, watching TV and eating our meals.

Upstairs Business Class Cabin

The Business Class configuration actually made it pretty difficult to deal with Lizzy since there were small compartments and I couldn't see or reach her when sitting down.  She was also very upset that the movies didn't work until we were at cruising altitude and was generally very restless.  She was up at about 5:30am and it was now about 4:30pm and she was just fussy.  After surviving lots of crying before take off and while getting to 35,000 feet, she was fine once we put Frozen on.  

The best picture we could get

Hard at work on her activities

Finally a happy camper

Didn't care for the kid's meal and ate three or four peas

She had a few bites of her kid's meal, I had a shrimp appetizer with a salad, beef curry with rice and some cheese and fruit for dessert, all of which was surprisingly good.  Christine, the main flight attendant upstairs, also brought me some first class champagne since I told her I had never really had champagne before.  I still would have preferred gatorade or a milkshake, but it wasn't bad.

The beef curry and rice were better than the picture may lead you to believe

After meal service was complete, Rosemary came upstairs to save us from the misery of Business Class and brought us down to join Mary and Annie.  Business Class is amazing, until you have the entire First Class cabin of a Cathay Pacific 747 to yourself!

Back to Mary. As expected, and unlike her sister, Annie did great. Even though we chose the front two compartments that were closest to each other, I still couldn't see or reach her because the cabin was so huge.  Despite that, she was very content drinking her apple juice and working on her Sofia the First activity bag (Target Dollar Spot, how I miss you) while we waited for takeoff.  The flight attendants loved her and all squealed with delight when she colored a picture for them.  While we were waiting, Rosemary introduced herself to me and let me know that because First Class was empty, she would be allowing Joe and Lizzy to come join us so the family wouldn't have to be separated. I tried to talk her out of it. Kidding!

This is awesome

About 300 sqft all to ourselves!

Heaven

Hi over there!

Thinking very hard about how to answer

After takeoff I requested our meals right away since I was pretty hungry and I wanted to have it out of the way before Joe and Lizzy came down.  I ordered a vegetarian meal since airline meat usually grosses me out but the food wasn't anything special.  There was a vegetable couscous appetizer, a green salad and a pasta/mystery fish entree.  There was also a bread basket and cheesecake for dessert.  I picked at all of it but I would say the meal was average at best.  Annie had a kids meal with fish fingers, mashed potatoes, mixed vegetables, bread and a flan-like dessert.  She filled up on cheezits while we were waiting for take off and then warm cashews right after that, so she didn't eat much of her actual meal. We had the option to dine together since there is an extra seat in each compartment but Annie wanted to watch a movie while she ate so I let her do that.

Happy camper loves flying

Annie's apple juice and my virgin mary

Joe and Lizzy came down right after dessert was served and the relaxing part of the flight was over :). 

Intently watching some Little Mermaid, just like on her previous flight

Soooo relaxing

Here comes trouble

It's all fun and games until someone turns the TV off

The First Class cabin had nine open suites, four on each side along the windows and one in the middle of the cabin.  Lizzy wandered around for a good portion of the flight checking out all the different suites and sitting in most of them for a bit.  It felt a lot like I imagine a giant private jet might feel like, but unfortunately I don't really have a reference point on that one.

We very easily could have fit the four of us in two of the suites and we discussed that we could probably make all four of us in one work if we had to.  We kept wishing this was a 16 hour flight so we could make up beds and settle in and sleep and watch movies and play around, but sadly this flight was barely four hours on the plane.  Since we may never have this experience again, we wished it could have lasted a whole lot longer!  We even briefly looked at just relocating to Taipei so we would never have to fly again since it is only downhill from here.

Lizzy was awful (no surprise there) after we had to put the TVs away for landing and we were so thankful that no one else was up there to have to listen to her complain and cry about anything and everything.  Granted, she was all by herself and she couldn't see any of us, but she has flown a lot before.  Since she was seated in the compartment behind me, we tried to keep her quiet by throwing Black Forest gummy bears at her one at a time.  It was kind of funny sitting there lobbing candy in her general direct hoping she could reach it.  When we went through that bag, Joe tossed over a full bag of Haribo gummies and she was quiet as she tried to stuff the entire bag into her mouth.

All you can see are feet, but there was lots of screaming and gummy bear tossing going on here

Annie just sat in her seat quietly working on some drawings.  I am always thankful for those times when one child is acting like the devil and the other one compensates by being on her best behavior. 

We landed and the girls gathered their stuff, said bye to the flight attendants and we were the first ones off the plane.  We waited for our stroller, cleared immigration (no visa needed), got our bags from baggage claim and found the taxi area.

There was an ATM on our way out so we got about $100 worth of Taiwan dollars which we needed since the cabs did not take a credit card.  There is an organized taxi area with a board that gives you a rough idea of what your fare will be.

We piled into a Toyota Camry around 7:30pm and made the trip to the Grand Hyatt Taipei through pretty light traffic in about 35 minutes.  Lizzy slept the whole way.  The taxi driver used the meter and there were no issues, which is always nice.

An interesting note about the day was that for take off and landing, it would have actually been about 100x easier to have been in coach with Lizzy since she is a high needs toddler and probably needed a nap since she got up well before 6am.  Had another passenger been in the cabin with the way Lizzy was behaving at landing, it would have been horrifying.

Once at cruising altitude, however, it was a truly amazing experience in Cathay First Class with the girls.  On the scale of a two and four year old, the compartments were the size of an apartment and came with some very nice ladies who brought them juice whenever they wanted it.  I hope to somehow have the chance to do something similar when the girls are a lot older, so I guess I better start spending some serious cash to earn some more Cathay miles. Right, Joe? Wink!

Trip Planning: Taipei and Hong Kong

Joe has been traveling for work much more than he anticipated so far this year, so we thought trying to fit in a week trip would be a good way to ensure some family time!  Since we are still new to the Asia travel experience, it is pretty easy to find availability with our dwindling points balances to go somewhere we haven’t been yet.  We have been wanting to take the girls to Hong Kong Disneyland (which would leave just the two parks in Paris on the list, until Shanghai opens) and focused our efforts primarily around trying to find something in that part of Asia.

Like most things with Joe, travel planning can be really, really annoying, but this time he actually wasn’t too bad.  After our New Year’s trip to 6 cities requiring 7 flights, we agreed that next time we would take a much more simple vacation with one destination.  After some discussion, we thought we would try two places over eight days and see if that would be more reasonable.  Next was figuring out how to do as much as we could using our miles and hotel points.

As usual, our millions of Delta miles, while actually pretty useful for one traveler, are incredibly difficult/impossible to use when you need them for a family of four.  Joe has stopped flying Delta in large part due to how difficult it is to use the miles, but we still earn about 300,000 a year through various credit card related activities, but we may need to rethink putting any spend toward Delta miles.  Since we were considering Hong Kong, we turned to our Chase Ultimate Rewards points, which are a transfer partner of British Airways, which partners with Cathay Pacific.  We checked availability on the British Airways website, and to our surprise, found pretty good availability from Tokyo to Hong Kong despite being “Golden Week” at both locations.  After tinkering around further, we decided to add Taipei as the second destination since it is only a two hour flight from Hong Kong.

Our new philosophy with miles and points amid all the massive devaluations is to use them any chance we have, and occasionally splurge to try out some of the premium cabins we couldn’t otherwise afford.  We ended up booking the following itinerary using Chase Ultimate Rewards points transferred to British Airways Avios:

Tuesday, April 29            Tokyo Narita (NRT) to Taipei (TPE)

Friday, May 2                  TPE to Hong Kong (HKG)

Wednesday, May 7          HKG to NRT

For the first flight, I will fly with Annie in first class, while Joe and Lizzy will try business class on the upper deck of the Cathay 747-400, which won’t be around much longer as they start to retire those gas guzzlers.  Annie is already excited and Lizzy doesn’t know or care, so it seems like a fair way to distribute the seats.  The two tickets in First Class cost 60,000 Avios plus $97.14 in taxes and fees while the two Business Class tickets cost 40,000 Avios plus $97.14.  To be clear, this is by no means cheap or a great (even good) redemption for such a short flight, but we wanted to the chance to try out these cabins.

We will fly economy from TPE to HKG for the 1h 50min flight, and then all take business class back to Tokyo from HKG.  Ideally, we would have liked to have taken First Class from HKG in order to try out the lounge in Hong Kong, but availability wasn’t there on the days that made sense.  The four tickets in economy cost 18,000 Avios plus $148 in taxes and fees while the four Business Class tickets from HKG back to NRT cost 80,000 Avios plus $139.34.  Again, this was not a great deal by any stretch, but it isn't always possible to maximize miles!

Next up was the hotel planning.  As we have said before, with the hotel status we have at Starwood and Hyatt, we do try to book there because we feel we get good value from the perks offered.  We ended up picking the Grand Hyatt Taipei over the W Taiepi for our three nights there.  The first night was booked using our annual free night from having the Chase Hyatt credit card, which comes with a $75 annual fee.  We booked the second and third nights using free night certificates earned from the recent Hyatt promotion, where if you stayed five nights, you received one free night at any Hyatt category 1-4.  The all-in refundable cash rate for the days we were staying was $897 for the base room, so it was a solid use of the free nights.

We then looked to Hong Kong.  Without getting into the details of the loyalty programs, we usually look to Starwood for the longer stays at one location since we qualify for Starwood Platinum status by staying 50 nights a year whereas we qualify for Hyatt Diamond by making 25 stays (regardless of nights stayed).  We received a certificate (that expires July 31^st) from Starwood for requalifying for Platinum last year that gives you 35% off a points stay up to five nights.  Another great thing about the Starwood program is that when you stay five nights on points, the fifth night is free.  Since we were staying for five nights, we tried to make this work, and lucky for us, things lined up perfectly.  We booked five nights at the W Hong Kong.  With the fifth night free and 35% off, it was only 10,400 points per night.  The all-in refundable cash rate was $410/night, so while this wasn’t an amazing deal, it was good enough under the new philosophy of using the points whenever possible.

Next up is trying to figure out what would be fun to do in Taipei and Hong Kong, but that should be a lot easier than this portion!