Alright, time to start writing about the trip!
After driving across the USA to drop off my car at my parents’ house in Washington DC and spending a bit of time with friends and family, I was finally ready to begin my trip. Before heading to Southeast Asia, I wanted to spend a few days in Korea, a country I have always wanted to visit and home to a few of my friends I was excited to see.
Flying transpacific is always fun for me – I find the level of service on Asian airlines could never be matched by that of US-based carriers, and they usually price a bit cheaper too! But the ride from the east coast to Asia is around 14 hours, and I wanted to do it in style this time. Up until now, I have only ridden in economy class for international flights, and wanted to try out a premium cabin. But I did some research and a one way ticket in business class from DC to Seoul was over $2500! However, I remembered that American Express has given me a lot of points from their credit card sign-up bonuses and transferred 95,000 points to the Japanese airline ANA. I used these points and paid about $215 in taxes and fees for a round-trip itinerary in business class as follows:
- New York JFK – Seoul ICN on Asiana
- ICN – Hong Kong HKG on Asiana
- HKG – Tokyo NRT on ANA
- NRT – Washington DC IAD on ANA
This itinerary allowed me to have a stopover of 3 days in Seoul, and on the way back in April (after my scholarship is over) I had an overnight layover in Tokyo. I have already traveled to Tokyo but heard that the town of Narita is interesting to check out.
Anyway, being the dork I am I had booked a flight out of New York instead of DC because I wanted to fly on the upper deck of an Airbus A380, so I had to find a way to get up there. That was no problem as there is quite a bit of competition on DC-NYC bus fares that keeps prices low. So I booked a ride on a company I had never heard of called OurBus for $19 on the day before the flight. I had quite a good experience, and would definitely recommend this company. The bus was nice and they gave me a free bottle of water, although there was an interesting incident where we somewhat crashed into a car in New Jersey. However nobody was hurt and it seems the car did not even have any scratches on it.
We made it safely to the Port Authority Bus Terminal in Manhattan and I got on a New Jersey transit bus to spend the night with a good friend of mine, and I had everything planned out for the journey the next day.
Or so I thought…
I had breakfast and said goodbye to my friend and waited for the bus to take me back to Manhattan. The plan was that I would take the bus back to Port Authority and then the subway across town to the airport, as I had done before. The flight check in cutoff was 60 minutes before the flight, and my plan had me arriving at the airport 30 minutes before that (because this was a codeshare award flight, there wasn’t really any way to check in online). However, the bus was quite late. In fact, it was something like 40 minutes late in arriving at NYC. Now, I am the king of getting on flights that I show up way too late for (I once arrived at the airport at 4:27 for a 4:30 international flight and made it), but Asiana seemed pretty strict on their cutoff time at JFK. A quick Google Maps search had me arriving at the airport about 50 minutes before the flight, but this wasn’t really good enough. Driving directions had me arriving about an hour and 10 minutes earlier, so I pulled out the Lyft App to call a driver, but the fare estimate was $82!?!? So I did something I had never done in the USA before, and I just walked outside and got into a yellow taxi, which did end up being cheaper than the Lyft, though not by much. I was pretty stressed for the whole hour ride and the taxi driver could tell – the Manhattan traffic was TERRIBLE! In one section I think it took 10 minutes just to drive one block. Anyway, we did end up making it around an 15 minutes before check-in closes, and I left the taxi very relieved and $68 poorer.
Have you ever missed a flight before? Or checked in past the official cut-off time? How about getting an insane price on a ride-share app when you need one most?