Australia Trip!

Follow posts for the latest adventures Down Undah.

ZERO DAY: Travel Marathon

Woke up at a Grand Rapids Airport (GRR) hotel* at 4am. TimeShifter app coached me to get up then, turn lights on and have some coffee. The United Airlines trip countdown widget on my phone says “0” so here we go. Chris and I had some Keurig coffee, hopped into the airport shuttle van with a very AWAKE driver taking us and a Delta flight crew to GRR for our first of three flights between us and our destination. *hotel was free with points; roundtrip flight GRR-LAX was $12/ea with Delta AmEx points

Flight one, Delta GRR-MSP (same crew from our shuttle van, that was funny) was a bit bumpy but no big deal. TimeShifter said try to sleep. Got to MSP (TimeShifter says wear sunglasses, no caffeine) and found the recently opened PGA Experience Lounge. Croissant bacon egg + cheese with fresh fruit was decent. *breakfast was free with Priority Pass food/bev credit

This lounge is a bit different than others I’ve been in. There’s a putting green you can play around on for free, or golf simulators for a fee. Through the wall of windows you can watch planes taking off, the Minneapolis skyline in the distance. Or you can eavesdrop on the business bro pacing all through the lounge talkin BIDNESS. Engineering, teams, insurance, maximizing opportunity, launching, credibility blah blah blah. I put my noise canceling headphones on and pulled up Men At Work’s 1983 Cargo album and now I just see the guy’s lips moving as he putts with one hand and talks on his phone with the other.

The next leg is MSP-LAX. I am supposed to sleep as much as possible. We’ll see how that goes. If you’ve never tried TimeShifter, highly recommend it. It was on a Wall Street Journal list of essential travel apps, and I used it in 2018, the first time I went to Australia. Of course, there’s no way to know how I would’ve done without it, but I like having some guidance with the promise of moderated jet lag.

App-wise, I’m also using TripIt for the first time. It’s really easy to use and I like having all the who / what / when / where in one place.

AND NOW: LAX FOREVER

You will recall that I woke up in Grand Rapids at 4am. That would’ve been 1am here in Los Angeles. It is now almost 4pm here, 7pm where I woke up. I did sort of nap(ish) on the 3.5 hour flight here but admit that I cheated and started listening to Jen Sincero’s You Are A Badass at Making Money about ⅔ of the way through. I am horrible at sleeping on planes. At home I am a side sleeper and/or tummy sleeper. Without a way to curl up and pull covers up to my ears, it’s really challenging.

So you might’ve noticed the mentions of all the free stuff so far on this trip. Because we knew quite some time ago that this Australia thing was happening, we had time for some serious point-accumulation strategy. Delta AmEx with massive miles reward? Check. United Mileage Plus VISA with equally massive miles reward? Check. And thanks to AwardWallet, I was able to quickly see that our IHG Hotels points were about to expire–and that they were enough to cover the hotel room last night.

Oh - and that United bonus also included 2 United Club Lounge passes! What a great thing to have when you arrive at LAX at 1:30pm and your flight to Australia doesn’t depart til basically midnight (shout-out to the rental car shuttle driver who got us from Terminal 1 to Terminal 7). More free food and beverage, bring it on.

When I booked the United round trip to AUS, I used up all our miles, his miles, and my Chase Sapphire points and was able to request an upgrade to Premium Plus, with 6” reclining seats like you’d find in their domestic first class cabin, and some other nice perks as well. The upgrade was granted about 10 days ago and that was thrilling.  Still, I was fantasizing about the lie-flat Polaris cabin and thought hmmmmm…

In 2018, I went to Australia for the first time and was in premium economy sitting next to a nice guy who was traveling on business. We got to talking during boarding about how awesome it would be to get to sleep on an actual bed on the flight. I said since I didn’t have the United VISA I couldn’t even put myself on the upgrade list. He said oh well I have the United VISA and I *am* on the upgrade list. And not long afterward, a flight attendant approached him and gave the little “come with me” index finger curling gesture. He was like wait really? She nodded, he gave me that sorry-not-sorry shrug, and I got to know a new seatmate. But that experience stuck in my head and I was determined to see if I could wangle some Polaris access somehow. As I type this, the upgrade would be $2299…per person. Yeah no.

But I did some reddit / TripAdvisor / Points Guy research and asked a travel-savvy friend for tips. Ask at the service counter inside the United Club, not at the main check-in counter, he said. Seems a solid strategy. Ask it like this, he said, giving me some carefully chosen verbiage. So I freshened up and gave it a try. The representative was very friendly and helpful, but she said merely having the VISA does basically nothing now. It’s all about your status with the airline, how often you fly, what level of access you’ve earned.

As with everything these days, it seems, it’s the Velvet Rope Economy at work. There are so many more people on this planet now, over twice as many as there were the year I was born. Businesses are making major bucks off our desire for ease, comfort, access, and of course prestige or the perception thereof.

So the way upgrades to Polaris work in 2023 is more like: who’s willing to pay $2299 at 4:30pm? And the price will trend down the closer we get to boarding until they’ve all been auctioned off.

In the meantime, the United Club lounge is quite nice, with a nice salad option, ramen bar, illy espresso machines, and a full bar, as well as lots of space to relax, get some work done, or just watch thousands and thousands of people come and go here at LAX. I appreciate and am grateful to be past this particular velvet rope today. Regardless of our seat numbers, we’ll wake up Saturday morning in Sydney, baby!