Ewens-Downing Adventures in Asia

How much preparation do you think goes into a three week trip to Asia? Well, when you are two travel-savvy guys like us who like our creature comforts, it is considerable. The first most important thing to get in place as soon as possible are your airline reservations. So that’s what I worked on first.

First I thought I’d simply jump on the web and see what the various airline carrier options were like. We wanted to visit Hong Kong and then Japan, or visa-versa. At this point we were still flexible on dates and itinerary. Another limiting criteria was the fact that one traveler who shall remain anonymous (RON) has vowed to never fly coach again. So we had to fly at least business class. Well, as it turns-out, the Japan-SFO route is very popular with Japanese tourists. And they like to splurge and fly business and 1st class. So the law of supply and demand kicks-in and the airlines have jacked-up the rates to $10,000 US for business class and $17,000 for 1st class, round trip. Ack. I like getting pampered as much as the next guy. But that was a bit rich for our blood. So much for the airline web sites.

Next I thought I’d just crank our itinerary through one of the discount travel web sites and <POOF> it would all get taken care of in an instant. No such luck. It’s one thing to get a reservation from SFO to a destination and back again. But we wanted to first go to Hong Kong and then fly over to Japan. All the travel web site engines did not like that little detail. They would generate some obnoxious fares that took us through destinations all over Asia, presumedly for the sake of saving a couple bucks. It wasn’t very productive. No matter which options I tried, on countless sites, tweaking endless options, the result was either no results or a circuitous multi-hop plan that took us too far out of the way to make it feasible.

Next I tried going through a travel agency in Japan Town. They were quite helpful. I still got some rather expensive rates for ANA and JAL. The least expensive business class was on United Airlines. Ugh. Ron has had horrible experiences on that airline for the last few months. And a couple friends who had flown it to Japan and back said it was cheap, and that was about it. So nix on the United. The travel agent did drop one interesting tidbit. She mentioned that certain airlines would let us do a stop-over on our way to Japan at no extra charge. But unfortunately none of the rates seemed within our travel budget. After getting frustrated for a couple days I turned the airline reservation project over to Ron.

Now you have to understand that Ron is the airline reservation wiz between us. (He’s such a show-off.) But after browsing some web sites he too got frustrated. Some airline web site engines just wouldn’t tell him certain fare schedules for our multi-hop route. So he did something quite unorthodox: he called the airline. In this case it was Air Singapore. We had heard really good things about that airline from various travelers. Their business class was better than United’s 1st class. And their base rates were reasonably within our new budget. They really pamper their business and 1st class patrons. In no time the customer service rep had found us a reasonable rate that allowed us to do our stop-over in Hong Kong. The reservation got made and we were set in the air travel department. One down!