I have been on the road a lot lately, and ended up with enough miles on Alaska Airlines for both Olga and I to go to Russia. Alaska has quite a few partners, and some of them have flights to Moscow, but the only partner that flies to St. Petersburg is British Airways. I am Americanized – I was foolishly thinking that booking an "award" ticket with British would be just as easy as booking one on Alaska. Well, not really.
There's no online tool to manage award bookings with partners. You have to call Alaska's partner award desk, and painfully go through all the options with them. I never realized that I was taking Internet business for granted; with my travel I can simply hop online and have an e-ticket in no time. Individually, both airlines do offer such convenience, but once you use an unusual monetary instrument, such as miles from a different carrier it all becomes far more difficult. The partner desk people are helpful and patient. The trick there is that you don't have any means of visualization of the options available to you except for handwritten notes you need to take as you speak with them.
It turned out that to book a route you really want on your dates with British (and I suspect it's true for other non-American airline partners), you need to make that reservation well in advance. I called about a month ahead of time – and I couldn't get on the direct flight from Seattle to London anymore. The only viable option was to go through Denver. That was a disappointment, and I was threatened with the idea of this trip taking a lot longer than it would have – 2 hours to Denver plus 9 hours to London, with all the padding around those and the wait between the flights all came down to 18 hours.
Ok, I figured that's the way it was. However, return flights were limited as well – and I ended up with an itinerary which started with a flight out of Moscow to London at 5 AM, followed by a 9 hour wait at Heathrow, and then a 9 hour flight back to Denver just to miss the last flight to Seattle – which would put us into an airport hotel in Denver! But it's free – kind of. Taxes and fees totaled around $100 per person, which was still much better than $1,500 each if I were to book with money. At the end of the day, I kept calling them back, going over the whole itinerary again, several times – and finally got lucky. Now after $100 in change fees we're leaving Moscow at 9 PM, staying overnight in London, and catching up a flight to Phoenix and then to Seattle on the same day.
On top of it all I got paper tickets mailed to me. This is another relic of the past, which sounded ok at first, but then became quite an annoyance to deal with. First off, you have to have them on you – or you don't get to fly. Sounds like a small thing, but it adds to the whole list of small things that in the end make all this travel so painful. I could not check in online – fully anyway – either. I did call British to get the reservation code, and did check in online – otherwise I wouldn't get seats assigned, but when we arrived to Denver the airline was looking for us all over the place to check us in again for some reason.
To tell the truth, I was expecting our flight experience to be something much worse than what it turned out to be. The Seattle to Denver flight was a quick 2 hour one on Alaska, nothing new there. The British flight was long and therefore painful. Despite taking Tylenol PM I could only take a 1-hour nap, and Olga didn't sleep at all, even though it was a quite comfortable 777.
We're now checked in, and ready to go explore London. We're tired, but here for just one night, so we're going for as long as we can. More to come!
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