Most important thing here: if you're traveling to WorldCon from North America and you haven't yet bought tickets, best to do so ASAP. Apparently a whole lot of people are going to Europe this summer.<\/p>\n
Though it may just be frequent-flyer programs that are low on availability; maybe buying regular plane tickets isn't a problem. Not sure.<\/p>\n
The rest of this entry goes into more detail than you probably care about. Feel free to skip.<\/p>\n
It occurred to me back in April that I had almost enough frequent-flyer miles on United to get a free ticket to Glasgow. I think at the time plane fare to Glasgow (on the airlines I was looking at, anyway) was somewhere around $1000, so a free ticket seemed like a good idea.<\/p>\n
Fortunately, my travel to WisCon and Swarthmore and North Carolina looked like it would be just about enough to get me to the necessary 50,000 frequent-flyer miles. Unfortunately, I had to wait until I actually had the full 50K miles before I could redeem them.<\/p>\n
I also found out I could get something like 20K miles by signing up for a United credit card and using it. (I have no intention of keeping the card longterm, as it charges an annual fee, but the annual fee was a very reasonable price to pay for 20K miles.) So I did that too, but it takes 6 to 8 weeks to credit your account after your first purchase, so my timing was bad on that as well. (There was a brief moment when I thought I could put the entire purchase price of my Prius on the credit card and get miles for that; sadly, the Toyota dealer wouldn't let me do that.)<\/p>\n
So I went on that trip, and came home, and looked at my frequent-flyer account, and found out I was just about 700 miles short. So I bought more miles, but that also took a few days to credit the account.<\/p>\n
The upshot of all that is that Monday turned out to be the earliest I could book a ticket by redeeming my frequent-flyer miles. And I didn't get around to actually doing it 'til just now. At which point I learned that there are no frequent-flyer tickets available (at my award level) for flights between San Francisco and Glasgow the weekend of August 4 to August 8.<\/p>\n
The nice woman on the phone found me flights leaving on August 3 and returning on August 10. And it would be nice to be there at the beginning of the con, and have a couple days of being in Scotland afterward. I like what I've seen of Scotland (which is to say Edinburgh), and I could happily just sit in a park or a pub and listen to the accents for a couple of days.<\/p>\n
On the other hand, my vacation time at work is already totally bottomed out (as in, it's as far negative as they'll allow it to go), which means I would have to take several days off without pay. Which would be fine if I didn't have a new car to pay for.<\/p>\n
Factoring in the days off without pay and the extra costs for extra nights in hotel and such, I'm not sure the frequent-flyer thing is worth it; it might make more sense for me to just buy a full-fare ticket. Though prices have gone up; according to Orbitz, the cheapest available flights leaving on the 4th and returning on the 8th are around $1200. And those cheapest flights would have me arriving on the 5th and leaving very early on the 8th, so it would mean I'd really only have two or two and a half days at the con.<\/p>\n
. . . I guess I should think about it this way: leaving on the 3rd and returning on the 10th would mean taking only three extra<\/em> days off work (beyond my original 4th-to-8th plan), and would involve only two extra nights in a hotel (because I wouldn't arrive until the 4th; it's a long travel day, two stops in each direction). Which is all still pretty expensive, but not as much more expensive than the original plan as I was thinking a minute ago. And I suppose I could theoretically work remotely for a day or two. Have laptop, will travel.<\/p>\n Anyway. I had her hold the tickets for me; I have three days to decide. All suggestions welcome.<\/p>\n (After I wrote all that, I discovered that I have a whole bunch of frequent-flyer miles on Alaska, more than enough to get a free ticket to Europe. I wish I had realized that two months ago. Sadly, at this point they too are basically all out of tickets for frequent-flyer award travel for this summer. The guy on the phone offered to get me tickets leaving on August 17th, but somehow I think showing up for WorldCon two weeks late would be considered impolite.)<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Most important thing here: if you’re traveling to WorldCon from North America and you haven’t yet bought tickets, best to…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[39,34],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2965","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-conventions","category-travel"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2965","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2965"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2965\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2965"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2965"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2965"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}