Etihad business to Europe: planes; trains; but no automobiles

[kylemcd]

Intro​

After many years of earning points, I was hoping to travel with my adult son to Italy, and particularly to show him Venice. (Before it goes under!) My wife does not like cold weather, so generally is not interested in travel to the Northern hemisphere from around November till February, so this would be just me and my son.

We had a pretty narrow window of time for travel: anything from after Christmas, until the end of January, and the only obligatory stop we were after was Venice; anything additional would be a bonus.

I'm always interested in seeing how other folks redeem their points and what they do for their travel, but also, what the costs turn out to be. So, in case it's any use to others, I'll share what the costs were for this trip, on top of our "free" flights.

Planning​

After a couple of weeks of fruitless searching for seats — I could find J seats for travel from Europe to Oz, but nothing for Oz to Europe — I bit the bullet and contacted Frequent Flyer Concierge about finding rewards seats for two, departing Melbourne either late December or early Jan, for a trip of around 3 weeks to Italy or any other major entry port to Europe within striking distance of Italy. It took them only 24 hours to say, yes, they could find some seats.

The suggested route was MEL-AUH-DUS, DUS-AUH-MEL on Etihad in business class, for a total of 278,000 VA velocity points (+ taxes of around $1680.98 per PAX). If we had more flexibility with the time of year we could travel, perhaps we might have been able to get redemptions on an airline without taxes that were quite so steep, but, that wasn't an option so the choice was to either suck it up, or not go.

Suggested departure from Melbourne was 01 JAN 2024, with return from Frankfurt 16 JAN 2024.

Given the same trip as paid business fares on Etihad would be around $21500, and I had the points, I decided to go for it, notwithstanding the fairly step taxes.

I would never have thought of looking for flights into Duesseldorf. My own searches had not turned up any rewards seats into any European ports on any VA partner airlines over December or January, and when I searched again after getting the recommendations from the Concierge service, I could find only seats on 01 JAN 2024 and only into Duesseldorf!

Return availability was a different story though, and I was able to find reward availability from Rome FCO-AUH-MEL (as well as FRA-AUH-MEL) on multiple dates through January.

I decided we would travel from Duesseldorf to Italy, and work our way south and fly out from FCO, to avoid doubling back to Germany, and locked in the seats with a return departure from FCO on 18 JAN 2024. Taxes worked out a little cheaper than quoted: $780.44 pp outbound, $751.54 pp return, for total of $3050-odd. (Ouch!)

Options I considered for travel in Europe were to fly, to hire a car and drive, or to travel by rail.

It turned out that rail was the cheapest and easiest way to get from Germany to Italy, and then, around Italy. My first question was whether it was cheaper to buy a Eurail pass, or purchase separate fares from Deutsch Bahn and ItaliaRail. That didn't take long to answer: a single high-speed rail ticket from Duesseldorf to either Cologne or Munich on Deutsch Bahn was more than a multi-day Eurail pass!

So, the next step was to figure out the best route, and how many days we would need for train travel, and then what Eurail pass was required. That was not so straight forward. The Eurail app and website is not particularly intuitive. I finally figured out that I could create a "trip" (or itinerary), and once I had that figured out and knew how many days of travel was required, then purchase a pass. (The choices were 4, 5, 7, 10, or 15 day passes.) You then assign each day of the trip to a travel day in the pass. The pass can be either printed or used on a smart phone. The phone option seemed slightly safer, in that it is possible to transfer a pass from one device to another, so I carried a old Pixel in my checked luggage as a backup in the event my main phone was stolen or damaged. In the event of such a catastrophe, I should have been able to login to the Eurail app and transfer the pass to the second phone. No such backup with paper!

A friend suggested travelling through the Brenner Pass, from Austria to Italy (she described it as like "100 kilometres of postcard"), which would require travel from Duesseldorf to either Kufstein or Innsbruck in Austria, and then to Verona in Italy. So, our settled itinerary included travelling to Innsbruck, and from there, we would travel to Milan; Venice; Florence; and finally, Rome.

MEL-AUH-DUS​

The House, Melbourne​

Departure on 1 Jan was around 1600. We had the choice of the American Express Centurion Lounge (through my Amex Velocity Platinum) or The House (as a VA platinum, and also as business PAX with Etihad). I'd tried out both lounges at Sydney on past trips, so decided we'd try out The House and could move to the Centurion Lounge if we wanted.

The House at Melbourne Airport was similar in style to the one at Sydney (unsurprisingly), though I reckon the view over the tarmac is better at Melbourne, and we were happy enough to stay there. The coffee was good, and I had a light meal before we boarded.

MEL-AUH EY463​

EY463 was a 787-9, with the older-style business cabin. (As it turned out, none of the aircraft we flew had the refreshed business cabins.) We had seats 6D and 6G, both adjacent to the aisle, and rear-facing (which really wasn't much of an issue.)

The layout is a little odd, and it feels cramped, with not a lot of storage space. There's a gap between the table on the inside of the seat (which is the footwell for the passenger who is in the seat facing towards us), and the small storage bin immediately next to us. It's perhaps 5 to 7 centimetres, so too small to store anything, but big enough to drop something there (especially when the interior is dark)! The only thing of note is that there's a power point down there, and it had a universal plug so would take US, EU or Aus/China power plugs, and delivered a fair bit of power! I was able to plug in my Aohi GaN charger, and quickly charge both my and my son's iPhone _and_ an iPad Pro! In contrast, the USB-A ports to the inside of the entertainment control were very low-powered, probably delivering no more than 5A.



The seats were setup with a duvet, seat cover, and pillow, which filled the foot cubby that was the only feasible place to store them out of the way.



The cabin crew offered a pre-takeoff drink, and soon after takeoff, took our meal orders.

I had the burrata salad, and lamb ghouzi, which was quite nice but not as spicy as I had hoped.





The 787-9 doesn't have blinds, but instead, LCD in the windows which were dimmed shortly after takeoff, and then blacked out later. I personally like to have the windows "open" to look out at the view from 35000 feet, but I must be an oddity, because I find on most flights these days folks are happy to have the windows closed/dimmed, and this flight was no exception. (I think the cabin crew also dim them to encourage passengers to sleep.)

Speaking of sleep, I wasn't able to get much at all. The cabin on the first leg was really noisy. There were a lot of passengers making noise, including one who annoyingly kept hacking up a lung, and the cabin was hot, to the extent that I was sweating without using the duvet. I think the cabin crew went overboard with turning up the temperature to encourage sleep!

The headphones provided by Eitihad were pretty cheap looking, and I didn't bother with them at all, opting for my own noise-cancelling headphones. I have the Sony WH-1000XM5, but also had my recently purchased AirPods Pro, and although the Sony's were a bit better, to my ears, the difference was not very significant, and the noise cancelling on the AirPods was not far off the Sony's. Given the difference in size and weight, I'd seriously consider relying on just the AirPods, allowing for the fact that they don't have the battery life, and need something like the AirFly to use with the in-flight entertainment.



I had a cheese platter later during the flight, and the cabin crew were quick to answer any call for a drink or water, though they weren't proactive at all in offering anything.



Arrival at Dubai was on-time, and there was about a 10 min walk to the transfer gates. That confused me a bit, and initially I was worried we'd taken a wrong turn somewhere. We didn't want to "transfer" to another terminal! We just wanted to get to the lounge. Terminal A obviously uses "transfer" as I'd normally understand "transit". Oddly (to my mind at least), we had to go through a security screening point to get into the terminal (and the same again at the gate, when boarding our onward flight). Given you would expect any passenger in the terminal to have already gone through screening, I'm not sure what the point of that was.

AUH-DUS EY39​

EY39 departed at 0250 local time, and arrived slightly early at Duesseldorf at 0700.

Cabin service was much as before, with the crew taking orders for breakfast if we wanted to be woken before landing. (I had the bircher muesli.) This flight was not as full as the previous one, but still uncomfortably hot, and I was only able to get about an hour of sleep.

 

[kylemcd]

Trains & accommodation​

We caught the skytrain to Duesseldorf Flughafen, which is where our day's travel really got underway.

A very helpful resource I found for European train travel is Mark Smith's The Man in Seat Sixty-One, with lots of practical and detailed advice about trains and train travel. (For example, in the section dealing with Italian trains, he linked to a ItaliaRail website that provides live updates for trains, and shows platforms they will depart from, well in advance of the 10 minutes or so when the monitors at stations display that information.)

Our first train trip was just to the main station in the city, Duesseldorf Hauptbahnhof, and from there, on the high-speed train from Duesseldorf Hbf to Munich, a trip of around 4 hr 45 min on high-speed train. Seat reservations weren't mandatory on the German trains, but we had them, which turned out to be just as well, because the train was packed. (Reservations were a further cost on top of the Eurail Pass, and generally cost around €20 per passenger.)

There wasn't much to see or do at Duesseldorf Hbf, or around the station itself. A couple of suggestions from Google Maps proved to be closed down, and after my son had a snack at that most German of food chains — McDonald's — we found a sheltered cabin on the platform where our train was due, and waited in the (relative) warmth.

If anyone tells you about the legendary reliability of German rail, they're full of it. Our train was late, like most others that day, but we made our connecting train from Munich to Kufstein, but due to further delays, missed the connection at Kufstein for the last leg to Innsbruck. These were just regional trains, similar to metro trains in Australia and didn't require reservations, so we waited about half an hour for the next train, and arrived at Innsbruck Hbf around 1950, and then walked to our hotel about 20 min away.

All up, we'd covered around 705 km, and been travelling for pretty much the whole day. That was a mammoth effort, but fortunately, all our trips after that were far more straightforward and less onerous.

Innsbruck (meh)​

We stayed at the Tivoli Innsbruck, because it's allegedly a Hilton hotel, but it was pretty sad and grubby, despite the €205 per-night cost. If you get the chance to stay there...don't.

Next morning we woke to a cold but bright Austrian morning, with spectacular views from the roof of our hotel of the surrounding snow-covered mountains. Innsbruck itself seemed a good place to be leaving from, but the mountains were a sight to behold.



We walked back to the city centre (where it proved near impossible to find anywhere for breakfast as every cafe was filled with domestic tourists obviously there for the snow), and then caught our train to Verona, through the Brenner Pass. There were some spectacular mountains and passes, but because it was winter but with no snow at the altitude we were at, parts were quite drab. There were several small towns along the way, with lots of barracks-type accommodation, and a lot of tunnel and roads construction, so I guess these places housed the Austrian equivalent of FIFO workers? The four-lane motorway often passed over the train line, and would have offered an even better view of the valleys and surrounding mountains, but I was glad to not be driving that given the volume of cars and trucks, in winter, on the opposite side of the road for us Aussies, in winter.

The journey to Verona was around 3 hours 30 min, and we had about an hour to kill there. The train station itself was a little more inviting than Duesseldorf or Munich, with a halfway decent cafe there, but there was nothing of interest to see immediately outside when we ventured out.

The next leg was the Frecciarossa (Italian high-speed train) to Milan, which was even nicer (and faster) than the German ICE (inter-city express) from the day before (and required seat reservations).

Milan​

It took just under 1 hour 15 min to travel the 160-odd kilometres from Verona. We stopped at the Mercato Centrale or central markets above the train station, and had dinner from one of the many food stalls there, before catching the metro to the centre of Milan. (Public transport in Milan was pretty straightforward: its system happily accepted Apple Pay, so we just used our phones to swipe on and off at the stations, and the correct fare was charged to our credit cards without having to figure out how to use the ticket machines. Combined with CityMapper, it was very easy to get around the city.)

We stayed at The Street Milan, literally about 80 metres from the Piazza del Duomo, at a cost of around €1150 for 3 nights, plus tourist tax of €5 per person per night. (Most of the major tourist towns in Italy now charge a bed tax for tourists staying within specified bounds of the city, and some such as Venice, a higher tourist charge for day trippers.) It wasn't the most expensive hotel I found when researching accommodation, but it was certainly towards the upper end, but very well placed. It was literally next door to a place called Luini, a famous shop exclusive to Milan that sells panzerotti, a sweet stuffed pastry, and that had long albeit fast-moving queues out the door all day, every day. We used our location to good advantage, and got to the head of the queue one day before the 1000 opening, to see what all the fuss was about. Can report they were bloody good!

Highlights of Milan were the Duomo, Teatro alla Scala, Castello Sforzesco, and of course The Last Supper. (Despite having seen the painting so many times in photos and video, it was still amazing to see for real. The 3D effect achieved by Leonardo da Vinci is mesmerising, and I'm sorry we only had the allotted 15 minutes to view it.)

Venice​

Next, Frecciarossa to Venice, which took 2 hours 30 min to cover just under 260 km. For this, and future trips, I deliberately planned our journeys to arrive in our next destination about 1800 to 1900, so after checking out, we'd spend the day sightseeing before the next leg, and wouldn't lose time waiting for check-in at the new location.

We walked from Santa Lucia railway station to our hotel in Zattere, the Palazzo Veneziano, on the south side of the main part of Venice. I was able to get a room here redeeming 136,772 QFF points in lieu of a cash price of around $AU 1184, plus tourist tax of about €3 per person per night. (After comparing dollar prices on several websites, and also the VA hotels site, it turned out that Qantas had a better value redemption rate and slightly better rooms available than VA, and the dollar amount was about the same as sites like booking.com and Expedia. The hotel informed me when I contacted it that it had the booking as via Expedia, so I guess that Qantas uses that for its back-end. I know some folks might baulk at using FF points for hotel redemption, but I have a large pile, and have been struggling to redeem them for flights (including for this trip), and was looking for any ways I could reduce my cash outlay on what was quickly revealing itself to not be a terribly cheap trip, especially given the strength of the euro against the Aussie dollar.) The hotel was really good: modern inside, super fast (130 Mbps +) internet, good service, great breakfast (included in our room rate), and what turned out to be an unexpectedly good location. I would stay here again if I ever returned to Venice.





The last time I was in Venice was in 2000 (pre iPhones, apps and Google Maps), and Zattere wasn't even shown in the maps we had available to us then. It turned out to be a really good part of Venice, mainly residential, with some really good restaurants nearby — including, unexpectedly, Venice's only and really good African cuisine restaurant! — and an easy 10 min walk to Ponte dell'Accademia crossing the Grand Canal, and no more than another 10 min to arrive at Piazza San Marco if we walked east, or 20 min to walk to the Rialto Bridge if we headed north.

There were vaporetto or water ferry stops 2 minutes walk from our hotel, and armed with a 48 hour vaporetto pass and CityMapper, we were able to reach every part of Venice in no more than 25 min. Venice was bitterly cold a few days we were there — hovering at or just above 0℃ with a wind-chill to match — but despite that and the fact this was the low season, there were still enough tourists to show that in high season it must be just impossible to get around! We booked tickets to go up the Campanile di San Marco and enter the Palazzo Ducale (the Doge's Palace) — seemed that the Tiqets platform was the best place to do that — but probably didn't need to. However, it was just as well we'd booked tickets for the Basilica di San Marco: there was a queue for that, and a steady stream of tourists throughout!



''

 

[kylemcd]

Florence​

Next stop was Florence, and this time the Frecciarossa took just over 2 hours to cover just under 240 km to Florence. The main train station, Firenze Santa Maria Novella, was just over 1 km to the Hotel Calzaiuoli, and it only took 20 min to walk there. This also was a QFF points redemption of 189,337 points in lieu of what would otherwise have been a cash price of around $AU 1673, plus tourist tax of €7 per person per night. The hotel was not quite as modern as the one in Venice, but looked like it had been refurbished in the last few years, and also had a good included breakfast with our rate. Internet however was woeful, regularly timing out and never exceeding around 3 Mpbs. Using my Vodafone $5-per-day international roaming wasn't much of an alternative, as the thick stone walls hindered mobile reception, and Vodafone AU only had 4G coverage in Italy (but 5G in Germany and Austria), and reception was quite patchy. I ended up buying an eSIM from Airalo to fill in the gaps, which it did very well.

The whole historical part of the city is around 2 × 1.5 km, so very walkable. Hotel Calzaiuoli was literally in the heart of Florence, so scored highly for that. If I returned to Florence, I reckon I might try Leone Blue Suites, which was a little further west, and I was very nearly going to select but for the central location of Hotel Calzaiuoli.

Highlights in Florence for us were:

• the Duomo (get a Brunelleschi pass to climb the cupola or dome, enter the crypts, climb Giotto's Campanile and visit the Baptistery, and see the museum which was really worthwhile)
• secret passages tour of the Palazzo Vecchio — for us, due to the time of year, with a grand total of 2 participants! — (highly recommended)
• Galleria dell'Accademia and Michelangelo's David
• walking up to the Piazzale Michelangelo overlooking the city
• an honourable mention to the Mercato di Sant'Ambrogio — the Sant'Ambrogio markets — and surrounding foodie haunts. Try Cibreo Trattoria for amazing Tuscany food (bookings a must, any time of year, and not to be confused with the much more expensive Cibreo Restaurant 20 metres up the road, or Cibreo Cafe next to that)
• All'antocio Vinaio, which gets rave reviews for its panini, and had consistent queues with 20 min waits — bearing in mind this was low season — but after trying a panini from next door's La Fetunta, I reckon that was just as good, and with nowhere near the wait.

 

[kylemcd]

Rome​

Last stop was Rome. Frecciarossa from Florence was around 260 km, with travel time of around 1 hr 35 min. The metro in Rome is not extensive, so we caught a taxi from Roma Termini using the app FreeNow (similar to Uber, which is banned in Italy aside from Uber Black). Our accommodation was in the Centro Storico area at Navona Essence (a recommendation from Lonely Planet), 10 min walk to Navona Plazza and 15 min to the Pantheon, 25 min to the Castel Sant'Angelo, 30 min to the Vatican to the north-west or 30 min Colosseum to the south-east. This was a quirky little hotel in an obviously re-fitted old building, with odd steps leading up to and then down to our room — so not good for folks with any accessibility needs — but just the best location. I'd rate it a 3.5 star: not quite as swish as the previous hotels, but a more affordable cash price of €535 for 4 nights, plus €6 per person per night tax. I'd definitely stay there again if returning to Rome. I won't list the highlights of Rome: everything's a highlight.

 

[kylemcd]

FCO-AUH-MEL​

Plaza Premium Lounge, Rome​

Our flight from Rome was EY84, scheduled to depart 2135. I opted for a car arranged through our hotel to drive us to the airport, at a cost of €55, given the alternative would have been either walk with our luggage the 3 km to Roma Termini or pay around €20 for a taxi to Roma Termini, and then catch an airport train at a cost of €14 per person. (Leaving our luggage at the hotel and returning to be driven door-to-door meant we could spend the rest of our last day sightseeing, which we did, walking to the Pantheon, then the Trevi Fountain and Spanish Steps, and up to the Villa Borghese and through the gardens in the north of the city.)

After a 45 minute drive to the airport, business check-in was quick, as was security screening.

Etihad doesn't have its own lounge at Rome, but offered us access to the PrimaVista lounge. I also had access to the Plaza Premium Lounge, via the PriorityPass mebership I get with my Amex Platinum Reserve, and after reading the review of the PrimaVista lounge on One Mile at a Time, decided we'd try the Plaza Premium. I've gotta say, if the Plaza Premium was the better of the two, then the PrimaVista can't be much chop. We arrived at the Plaza Premium around 1830 (and learnt on our way out it was closing at 2100), and despite being reasonably busy, it looked as if there was only the bare minimum of staff rostered on. The showers were "out of service". The barista-coffee machine was not operating, and the sole staff member behind the counter could only say it wasn't operating and to use the self-serve coffee machine. Alcohol was an additional purchase. The WiFi was slow — the best I could get was 3 Mbps down — and there was no cleaning of the general lounge, clearing plates and glasses etc for the whole time we were there.

Boarding was via skytrain to a satellite terminal where gates E31 to 44 are, and business passengers were invited to board straight away.

FCO-AUH EY84​

This was another 787-9, again with the older style seating. The staff on this flight were really good, and the crew member looking after my aisle was excellent, suggesting extra wines to go with different dishes, and frequently coming around to check on all her passengers. I made the most of it on this trip, with a pre-takeoff glass of champagne and one after, and a Cointreau, wine with each course and a desert wine to follow!



This time I tried the mezze entrée, chicken breast for a main, and chocolate lave cake for desert.







At Abu Dhabi, I was able to try again the First Lounge thanks to my VA Platinum status, and after about a three-hour layover, we boarded our last leg to home on EY462.

AUH-MEL EY462​

The aircraft was originally scheduled to be one of the older 777-300ER, but turned out to be another 787-9, again with the older seating.





The staff on this flight were also pretty good, and I again made the most of the food and drink on offer (same menu as the previous flight), trying the tomato and lemongrass soup for entrée, seared cod for the main, and cheesecake for desert.







About 2 hours before landing I asked about one of the all-day snacks, and tried the steak sandwich but couldn't get the hazelnut pastry which had apparently run out, but was offered a croissants and pain au chocolat, washed down with coffee and and a Bellini.



I have to say that on all our flights, the food was excellent, and the wines and beers on offer were all good.

On both flights back to home, the cabin was cooler than on our flights from Melbourne, and I was quite comfortable when trying to sleep. I still only managed a few hours though, but was grateful for the ability to stretch out.

 

[kylemcd]

Finishing thoughts and costings​

This was only the second international business class product I've been able to try. (The other was Virgin's The Business to and from Hong Kong when it was flying there.) Although there were things that I reckon can be improved, it was still pretty darn good, and of course, sooooo much more comfortable than economy. I think, if I was to pay rather than redeem points, I'd probably try a competitor over Etihad if the choice was open, but I'd certainly be happy to fly with Etihad again if the opportunity arose.

Some general observations:

• Italy is much better geared to international tourists that it was when I last went there in 2000
• Most attractions can be booked online in advance. Nearly every website had an English version (one or two did not, and so I needed a web-browser translate function), but a surprising number of websites required creation of an account to purchase tickets
• I'd guessed it was possible to pay for nearly everything on credit cards (and as a side-benefit, start earning points to restore my now depleted balance of Velocity points) and so my guess that we would hardly need any cash was borne out
• Train travel was seriously easy and efficient. Arriving and departing in the heart of each city, without having to go through security checkpoints, was a boon
• We spent 4 days in each city, which to my surprise turned out to be enough to see all the attractions we hoped to visit. However, if we were visiting in high or even shoulder-season, I doubt very much we would have managed to see as much as we did
• I created a guide in Apple Maps containing all the attractions we wanted to visit, recommended restaurants and cafes, and important places like hotels and train stations. That meant it was very easy to select destinations for turn-by-turn directions as we walked around, but occasionally, locations were wrong and we had to resort to Google Maps
• CityMapper worked in every city we visited (but I had Moovit as a backup for any city outside coverage), and meant we could use public transport like a local if we wanted
• Nothing beat Google Maps for food recommendations (and also for finding public toilets). TripAdvisor was okay; FourSquare was not nearly as useful as I've found in Asia; and Yelp was a distant third, unlike its dominant position in North America. Apple Maps only linked to recommendations from TripAdvisor, so added nothing in that regard
• I found my paid subscription to TripIt continued to be exceptionally useful, and for this trip for the first time ever, I uploaded PDFs to it of all our various bookings, as well as having backups in DropBox and Evernote. TripIt is cheaper than flavour-of-the-month Flighty, and does just as well in advising of flight information, and also creates a travel itinerary as you send bookings to it. Much as I like Flighty's live widget, TripIt is better value and use

So, what was the total cost for our "free" travel?

The relative weakness of the $AU against the €Euro hurt. Most restaurants and cafes had a similar face value for food to Australia. So, an average lunch might cost around €30 to €40 — €3 for water, everywhere, always; cover charge usually 10% of the bill; mains between €15 - €20 per person; and maybe a coffee, and if you add an antipasto or primo (first course) to a secondo (second course), and it's very easy to incur about $AU60+ for a simple meal. A nicer evening meal could, and did on occasion, come to around €100, which equates to about $AU165! Whilst we shopped at supermercato when we could, staying in hotels meant we were very limited in what we could buy. (Wine by the bottle — and beer in three-packs! — was really cheap in Italian supermarkets, but all Italian wine used corks. I had to buy a corkscrew in my first supermarket, which cost me more than the bottle of wine!)

All up, our costs came to (including credit-card conversion fees):

• Return business class fares for 2 PAX: 278,000 VFF points
• Airline taxes: $AU 3063.96
• Train fares & reservations: $AU 1171.51 ($US 577 for Eurail; €84 for Eurail reservations; $AU 97 for ItaliaRail reservations)
• Food & drinks: $AU 2494.65 (€1532.74)
• Attractions: $AU 1695.08 (€667.10)
• Accommodation: $AU 3174.94 (€1894.98) and 326,109 QFF points
• Tourist taxes: $AU 265.95 (€158.80)

Overall, we got a holiday that packed a lot into a short time so was pretty good value in that regard, and that would have cost close to $40,000 if I'd paid for everything in cash, but using points as I did, came out to around $13,500. Not exactly "cheap", but for international travel with a high degree of comfort and convenience, not too shabby at all. I'd count that as a win for chasing points!

 

[MEL_Traveller]

Thanks for the report! Interesting to see you cost breakdown. I’m also about to do a couple weeks in Europe and have, unfortunately, had to budget about the same as your costs.

Interesting you also used 326k Qantas points. I’d value those at around $4400, so another cost to take into account!

 

[kylemcd]

Interesting you also used 326k Qantas points. I’d value those at around $4400, so another cost to take into account!

Yeah, I thought a bit about that, but then figured I'm sitting on a very large pile of QFF points, and I have not been able to obtain any available rewards flights with them. They're there to be used one way or another, and I was getting to the stage where reducing cash outlay was becoming more important!

I should add, the cash price of the two hotels was about $4500, so it was really a choice between being shot or poisoned.

 

[levelnine]

Thanks for the breakdown in costs as part of the trip report. Always interesting to see.

It really is appalling that Velocity charges so much for these types of redemptions. You can get the exact same flights for a fraction of the cash co-pay cost using American/AirCanada miles, so it is pure greed on Velocity's part.

 

[MEL_Traveller]

Yeah, I thought a bit about that, but then figured I'm sitting on a very large pile of QFF points, and I have not been able to obtain any available rewards flights with them. They're there to be used one way or another, and I was getting to the stage where reducing cash outlay was becoming more important!

I should add, the cash price of the two hotels was about $4500, so it was really a choice between being shot or poisoned.

I think that’s pretty good value then! I value the QFFF points against what I can get via Aeroplan, buying miles during a 100% bonus. $4400 is the price for a return business class ticket to Europe, or a semi-RTW going one way via USA. That equates to a qantas oneworld award for $318k. So I think you got good value for your points!

 

[kylemcd]

It really is appalling that Velocity charges so much for these types of redemptions.

Is it Velocity? I always thought that the taxes were charged by the carrier?

I think that’s pretty good value then! I value the QFFF points against what I can get via Aeroplan, buying miles during a 100% bonus. $4400 is the price for a return business class ticket to Europe, or a semi-RTW going one way via USA. That equates to a qantas oneworld award for $318k. So I think you got good value for your points!

I guess as with anything, value is in the eye of beholder. To the extent that I have found it impossible to get any Qantas classic rewards to anywhere I might want to go at any time I might be able to travel (for many years now) they're not worth much.

But, to get 8 nights accommodation in 2 four-star hotels in prime spots in prime tourist spots seemed to me at least to be a reasonable return on them!

 

[MEL_Traveller]

Is it Velocity? I always thought that the taxes were charged by the carrier?


I guess as with anything, value is in the eye of beholder. To the extent that I have found it impossible to get any Qantas classic rewards to anywhere I might want to go at any time I might be able to travel (for many years now) they're not worth much.

But, to get 8 nights accommodation in 2 four-star hotels in prime spots in prime tourist spots seemed to me at least to be a reasonable return on them!

I agree with you. Using your points for hotels, freeing up the cash to be able to buy in another program where you can get really good availability makes good sense!

 

[levelnine]

Is it Velocity? I always thought that the taxes were charged by the carrier?

No, it is the frequent flyer program. And Velocity gouges hard.

You pay 85,000 miles + $AUD109 ($USD72) on American:

 

[MEL_Traveller]

No, it is the frequent flyer program. And Velocity gouges hard.

You pay 85,000 miles + $AUD109 ($USD72) on American:
View attachment 368723

I thought it was half half? The operating airline sets the fuel surcharges, but the selling airline may or may not choose to levy them? AA doesn’t, but VA does. VA gets to keep the money it charges though.

If you were redeeming through EY you’d pay them.

 

[jase05]

No, it is the frequent flyer program. And Velocity gouges hard.

You pay 85,000 miles + $AUD109 ($USD72) on American:
View attachment 368723

I guess it’s swings and roundabouts.
UA and VS and NH redemptions are almost zero in carrier charges and even SQ is very low.
I guess it’s similar to QF where you pay extortionate rates for Emirates redemptions but AC for instances charge very little in the way of carrier charges.