We’re taking my niece to Scotland following her high school graduation this summer. While the rest of the family is navigating their own flights on a separate adventurous itinerary (including a stop in Dublin), I’ve been busy piecing together the routing for Rakhat and me from Vancouver.
My initial booking wasn’t great, although it has been a really tough summer to find award inventory so I was almost grateful to have anything at all. I managed to lock in YVR-CDG-EDI through Flying Blue for 105,000 miles and about $300 out of pocket per person. It was a steep price to pay for business class, but award space was tight and we needed a guaranteed way across the Atlantic.
Booked or not, the routing bothered me. Connecting in Paris during the peak summer travel rush is always a gamble, but our specific situation made it a massive liability. Rakhat travels on a Kazakhstan passport and doesn’t hold a Schengen visa. If everything goes as planned, an airside transit at CDG is perfectly legal. But if a flight gets canceled, an aircraft gets swapped, or a strike happens, the whole thing could quickly devolve into a complicated immigration issue. So yeah, Air France has nice champagne. We don’t drink, though, and there’d be no way to take the edge of the stress.
So, I kept gardening the reservation.
Last night, a much cleaner option opened up. British Airways did a massive inventory dump. Canada is officially in a recession now, and business class seats don’t appear to be selling. I was able to snag two seats to London via Cathay Pacific’s Asia Miles program. Even better, it was in BA’s updated Club Suites, costing just 63,000 miles plus $300 per person. Why did I use Asia Miles? This program discounts British Airways’ notorious fuel surcharges. I could have booked through Alaska or American for slightly fewer points, but it would have cost about $700 more per person in cash.
The obvious catch was that London isn’t Edinburgh. But instead of treating Heathrow as an annoyance to route around, we decided to lean into it. We could pull a day out of the Edinburgh itinerary, spend the day in London so Rakhat could see Big Ben, and fly up to Glasgow at night on easyJet. Why Glasgow? It’s a 45 minute train ride away from Edinburgh and this is the itinerary that worked, at a somewhat reasonable price.
Dumping the Flying Blue tickets cost us $150 in cancellation fees, and the easyJet flight added another $170. It wasn’t all bad news, though. We clawed back 15,000 Hilton points because our first night shifted to a cheaper property (with a free breakfast to boot). Because the transatlantic surcharges were essentially identical, the math was pretty clean: we saved 84,000 miles in exchange for a modest cash outlay and a cheap positioning flight.
More importantly, the entire Schengen transit risk evaporated. If easyJet melts down on the domestic leg, we are already inside the UK with plenty of backup train and flight options. We traded an unmanageable border control risk for a manageable domestic delay.
The British Airways inventory dump benefited our journey home too, although this required a different kind of surgery.
I originally booked economy class tickets from Glasgow to Vancouver via Gatwick, booked for 70,000 BA Avios and $150 each. I wasn’t wild about a 10 hour long economy class trip in British Airways’ high density “Gatwick special” configuration, but we needed an efficient route on a specific date and this was what was available. Besides, I reasoned, it was a day flight. Nevertheless, I kept monitoring the long-haul leg in case premium space became available.
When Club World inventory finally opened up on that exact Gatwick-to-Vancouver flight on which I was booked, I jumped on it using Atmos points. I would like to have rebooked the whole thing using Atmos points starting in Glasgow, but it simply wasn’t available from there; I could only start from London. The standard rate was 110,000 points, but applying the companion voucher from my Atmos Summit card knocked it down to 85,000 points, plus roughly $1,550 in cash. That’s a whole lot of cash, but it was in the trip budget. More importantly, it makes Rakhat happy. I don’t think there’s anything in the world he likes more than flying in premium cabins, with the possible exception of his cat Murka.
The challenge was preserving the UK domestic leg. A standalone cash ticket from Glasgow to Gatwick was running an absurd $350 per person, so I couldn’t just scrap the whole Avios itinerary. Instead, I called British Airways to see if they could manually drop just the long-haul segment. The agent managed to do it, triggering a partial refund of 48,500 Avios and $186 after accounting for the $55 per person change fee (since I was unable to do this online, the friendly agent waived the telephone booking fee).
When you compare the old return to the new one, the incremental cost to avoid a long transatlantic flight in economy came down to 36,500 points and about $1,200 cash. I don’t measure these redemptions against the airline’s fake $11,000 retail cash fares, because I would never actually pay that. I measure it against the baseline I already booked. For a long flight home after a long family road trip, that premium is probably worth it.
The trade-off here is baggage. Because the domestic leg and the long-haul business class flight are now on separate tickets, British Airways won’t through-check our bags in Glasgow. We have a three-hour window at Gatwick to collect our luggage, ground-transport it to the international terminal, and check in again. It introduces some friction, but a domestic-to-international self-connect with a three-hour cushion is a completely manageable risk.
So, don’t walk away from an itinerary once the confirmation email hits your inbox. Keep looking. Award availability is fluid, and options that didn’t work during your initial search could open up. This may save your budget (or your sanity) a month later.
