So a red bomb arrived in what I should consider as a rather inconvenient time.
Not the worst but there are better months for this in the foreseeable future.
Nevertheless, I've accepted it and flights have been arranged.
Let me recount the number of trips I have taken and will take in the year 2015.
Jan - Seoul, Korea
Feb - Shanghai, China + Hong Kong (not in passport) + Niseko, Japan.
April - Taichung, Taiwan
May - Batam, Indonesia
July - Perth, Australia (not in passport)
Aug - Melbourne, Australia
Sep - Penang, Malaysia
Oct - Vancouver, Canada
Dec - London, UK + Paris, France + Bordeaux, France + San Sebastian, Spain + Barcelona, Spain + Nice, France + Cinque Terre, Italy + Florence, Italy + Sorrento, Italy + Rome + Venice, Italy + Salzburg, Austria + Prague, Czech + Berlin, Germany + Amsterdam, The Netherlands
10 trips in a year! Madness!
This record is going to be hard to beat for the rest of my life.
Oh, and I'm still about 5,000 miles short over at Marco Polo to upgrade a Premium Economy ticket to a Business ticket, so I'll have to go to Canada on Economy. Hence I've chosen British Airways because I've got this impression that this airline has better leg space and wider seats, though I may be wrong.
*Upon checking SeatGuru, I was indeed wrong - both Cathay Pacific and Air Canada have similar if not better seat pitches and widths on their 777s and 747s, both of which I'm taking on trips. On the bright side, I'm earning lots of miles on BA on both the trips in Oct and Dec, and mileage on Air Canada is impractical while CX has been charging some of the highest prices for most of the flights I've been searching for this year.
Finished the Melbourne trip and it has certainly been a fantastic trip for me and her. Better still, both her parents like me now.
Finally understood the point of mileage runs. My definition of them goes like this:
Say a business class flight from A to B costs $5000 or can be redeemed for 50,000 miles. This makes the miles to be valued at $0.10 per mile.
If you can earn your miles at a price that's lower than this, you're going to beat the price that they've set!
So say you have found a return flight that costs $800 and earns you 10,000 miles total. If all you do is fly there and back with no hotel stay in between, you're basically buying the miles at $0.08 per mile. That's means if you fly that flight 5 times, you're going to be buying that business class flight for $4000 by redeeming all the mileage earned through those empty trips, ie at a 20% discount, sans the value of your time.
Moreover, it will help you fulfil the conditions of either a renewal or even a promotion in your frequent flyer membership.
After two days of research, I've come up with nothing.
Mileage runs do not work for us Singaporeans, as far as I can tell. Maybe I haven't gone deep enough or thought out of the box long enough, but this is my conclusion at this point in time.
The first thing I did was to search for the fares of most of the available flights on BA and CX originating from Singapore. Nowhere was cheap.
Later, I thought of making use of the seriously cheap fares that originate from other cities. For example, a return trip from Barcelona to Singapore on BA would cost just over half the price of a return trip from Singapore to Barcelona on certain months. What if... I book two flights originating from Barcelona, then go to London on the second half of the first trip (since the flights all require a transfer in London) and then return to Singapore on the first half of the second trip?
First flight:
BCN-LHR
LHR-SIN
SIN-LHR
LHR-BCN
Second flight:
BCN-LHR
LHR-SIN
SIN-LHR
LHR-BCN
And I take only the flights in bold.
My calculations showed that this was slightly more expensive than a simple return trip from Singapore to London, by just about S$100-200. Moreover, later I realized that this won't work because if I skip the first leg of the trip, they'll cancel everything after that.
However, this could still work if such ridiculous fares are available in cities that budget airlines fly to from Singapore. I could fly there on budget and return on the first half of the trip booked on that full service airline, giving me all the miles at much lower prices.
So far, however, no such luck.
03 Sept 2015
Signed up for the HSBC Visa Infinite for the mileage. With the recent Asia Miles promo of 45k miles as the welcome gift, the average cost per mile is around S$0.01/mile. To give you an example of what this means, the longest flights (10k miles and beyond) offered by Cathay Pacific, which the Asia Miles are for, can be upgraded from Premium Economy to Business for 55k Asia Miles, or straight from Economy to Business for 100k Asia Miles, and we're talking about return flights here ie to and fro.
I won't discuss redeeming the miles through buying the seat entirely with Asia Miles because apparently, Cathay Pacific is notorious for the difficulty in this because the airline releases its inventory of award seats a year in advance. However, I'm staying here because the Marco Polo Club is known to treat its members very well.
Quarrelled yesterday. Maybe I should record what we argued about because with my terrible memory, I can never argue very well. One cannot debate if one has nothing to back up one's words.
This time it started because I shifted my foot when she woke up from sleeping on it, and she was unable to go back to sleep because of that.
Anyway I think she's just grouchy from PMS and a lack of sleep, although her period had just started yesterday.
So "Leicester" is pronounced as "Less-ster". It should be broken down into "Leice" and "ster" instead of "Lei", "ce" and "ster".
人之初，性本善
It does not actually mean that everyone is good. Rather, I feel that it means that everyone started out good but were shaped by their environments to become who they are today.
Hilariously gross review of MGS V.
16 Sept 2015
Quarrelled yesterday because I missed her request for her macaroni to be cooked first (I was making dinner) and she scolded me for taking her for granted before going to sleep just before the food was ready. We were both tired.
On Sunday, we quarrelled because we were both tired again. She scolded me in public for forgetting stuff and I refused to apologize and eventually walked off. Encountered her again while looking for a taxi stand and made up the just ten minutes later.
Flying off to Penang tomorrow. In every trip, there's something new to be experienced.
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