DH got the go ahead for his holiday dates in early November, but we didn’t book flights immediately. This was in part because of the afternoon shift he was on that week meaning we didn’t see each other, and partly because I’d learnt from last year and decided to price up some average hotel costs for potential places we might base ourselves first.
However, excitement took over and within two days of his holiday dates being agreed, the flights were booked. But let’s backtrack a bit, because there’s a story here…
In September, we’d made our last mortgage payment, so knew we’d have extra cash every month now that we were mortgage free. Why not go mad and spoil ourselves a bit? (Admittedly that was just me thinking that and not both of us!
)
We’d previously travelled in Premium Economy on our anniversary trip in 2014, and I’d also travelled in PE last October when I went on a girls only birthday trip to Vegas where we were spoilt rotten by the Cabin Crew. They even gave us this little stash to take off the plane to have a drink on them in Vegas.
I don’t normally like flying very much, but for some reason I had a completely different experience on that flight.
This was enough to convince me that if the price wasn’t hugely different, my plan for future long haul trips involved travelling in a bit more comfort.
My powers of persuasion started with the dropping of a few little hints.
I’m very lucky that DH is easily persuaded.
We decided we’d travel in World Traveller Plus, which is BA’s version of Premium Economy, although I was worried I’d be a little disappointed with BA having only experienced PE with Virgin – reviews I’ve read on the Dibb seem to indicate it’s a poor comparison.
We weren’t able to book online as we wanted to travel in and out of different airports, so I had to ring BA. We discovered that we weren’t able to book it as BA Flydrive holiday and only pay a deposit either, as we didn’t want the car for the entire duration. I did tell them that hadn’t been a problem last year and that we’d dropped the car off upon arrival in San Francisco, but either things have changed or it was made more difficult because we didn’t want the car at the beginning of this holiday. Never mind, we had the funds to pay for the flights up front, so it didn’t really matter, or so we thought. If only we knew then what we knew now! More about that later.
While I’d been browsing prices online, I’d noticed some great prices to upgrade even further on the flight out to Vancouver. I decided to get some quotes – what could hurt? I wasn’t going to book as DH was at work, but I could talk to him about the different quotes when he rang me.
I chanced my arm and also got a quote for return flights in Club, but the return flight prices from Calgary made it extortionate,
so that idea was quickly dropped. However there were really good prices to upgrade one way on the outbound flight.
I’ll condense this a bit and let you know that I ended up getting a quote for a bargain upgrade to First Class. I’m not sure if it was a glitch or not, but the price for a First Class ticket to Vancouver was a fifth of the price of a First Class ticket from Calgary to London. Let’s just say I was rather excited.
It was nearing 8pm by this time, and the BA phone lines were about to close. I told the lady I’d been talking to that I couldn’t book there and then as I would need to confirm with DH first, so she gave me a her name and told me to call back the next day.
When DH rang me an hour later during his break, I could barely contain myself. The difference in price between WTP and First was the equivalent of two month’s mortgage payments that we were no longer paying. We agreed that we both work hard, we would never get the chance to fly First Class again, so decided to just go for it. After losing some family members suddenly over the past few years, our philosophy towards life has changed somewhat. Before this, we always had a very cautious attitude, but we try not to put things off anymore.
It was a long 21 hours until we could ring again and then it all went a bit wrong.
I couldn’t get put through to the lady I’d spoken to yesterday, so ended up going through it all again. The total price had almost tripled!
I was gutted. We tried changing the dates by a couple of days, but it didn’t make a difference. I gave him both quotes I’d been given the day before and he said he’d try to reset the system to yesterday’s date, to see if he could get the same prices. There were no guarantees but he’d give it a go and call me back.
I managed to ring DH and tell him, so we were resigned to being back to the drawing board, but less than an hour later they called me back with the same prices as my original quotes.
Ten minutes later, the flights were all booked and paid for!
The car hire was then put through as a separate booking, to be paid for upon collection.
It had been a bit of a rollercoaster of emotions for a couple of hours, but we could now relax and start looking at hotels.