Things are Coming Together...

“It doesn’t look like we have any available seats from LAX to BKK on Thai Airways for that date, or any date for the rest of the year” replied the agent.

“Excuse me?”, I replied.

“Thai Airways limits the number of award seats they make available to their partners…blah…blah…blah”, she droned on.

Panic started to overwhelm me. Had all those years of religiously flying Star Alliance airlines and accumulating hundreds of thousands of miles been for naught?

“How can there not be any award seats available for the rest of the year?”, I raged to no one in particular.

The usual traveler’s trick of calling back and talking to several agents until you get the answer you want didn’t get us any results either. Things were not off to a good start.

We had hoped to take the direct flight from Los Angeles to Bangkok, not only because it was several hours shorter than connecting through Taipei or Tokyo but also because Thai Business Class had a much better reputation than United which we had previously flown.

“Now what do we do?” I asked Betsy. “Do we just suck it up and take the flight through Toyko on United in Biz Class? Or do we fly coach direct to BKK so we can use miles?”

Such are the dilemmas of the world traveler.

A little research on FlyerTalk led me to find that if I registered for a frequent flyer number for All Nippon Airways (ANA, a Star Alliance member), they had a search feature that would allow you to search for award tickets across all Star Alliance members for any destination.

While a little cumbersome, after some searching I found a few flights from Los Angeles to Singapore on Singapore Airways new Business Class available for our time period.

So instead of flying to Bangkok we were flying to Singapore. Oh well, we had been to Singapore on our honeymoon and both liked it and were happy to go back. From there it would be an easy and cheap Air Asia flight up to Bangkok.

An extra bonus was that we would be able to use some of our Intercontinental or Marriott Points for our stay in Singapore.

Our flights:

Planning for Southeast Asia

Having lived in Geneva, Switzerland the last couple of years and being able to travel so easily around Europe, moving back to California was a bit of a shock to our travelling nature. Weekend trips to Phoenix just weren't the same as weekend trips to Paris.

So with that in mind we've decided to head back to Southeast Asia where we spent our three week honeymoon in the fall of 2003.

Our tentative itinerary is to fly in to Bangkok and then travel overland to Laos, Cambodia & Vietnam before flying to Myanmar (Burma) and ending up with a week on the beach in southern Thailand.

We are aiming to leave sometime between October and November of 2007 and will be gone about 3 months although this is flexible depending on how we are feeling. It could be longer (possible), it could be shorter (not likely).

Right now we are busily reading as much of the Lonely Planet guides as we can in anticipation of our trip.