Showering at MUC Airport

After flying 8 hours on a redeye flight, my parents and I arrived in Munich Airport less than well-rested. I mean, how can any normal New Yorker fall asleep for the night at 7PM New York time? So when we got off the plane, we looked for the closest Lufthansa Senator Lounge.

Now, to confuse people, Lufthansa has multiple airport lounges. The premier First Class Lounge is obviously for only First Class passengers flying on Lufthansa that day. There, you get served a complimentary gourmet meal as if you were in a restaurant with waiters and fine linen napkins.

Then you have the comparable Senator Lounge and Business Lounge.

The Business Lounge is obviously for passengers flying Business class on Lufthansa or any other Star Alliance partner. The Senator Lounge is for Star Alliance Gold Status members (regardless of their ticket's cabin type). However, those business class passengers cannot access the Senator Lounge unless they are also Star Alliance Gold Status members. So by simple logic, the Senator Lounge should be more exclusive - hence better, right?

Well, I can't speak for which Lufthansa lounge is actually better (if they're different at all), because my entire immediate family had Star Alliance Gold statuses. So we went into the Munich Senator Lounge downstairs by the G Gates where our next flight to Rome was scheduled to take off from.

By the time we got off the plane, went through European Union Immigration, and entered the lounge, it was about 7:45AM local time. Our next flight was scheduled to depart at 9:30AM with boarding starting at 8:55AM. That meant we had about an hour to relax.

Unfortunately, my parents were on antibiotics for a bug they caught, so they weren't allowed to drink any alcohol. Of course, it was also 8AM, so they probably shouldn't have been drinking anyway. So they did what they always do, ate free lounge food.

At the Senator Lounge, they had some scrambled eggs, but no hot meats. Just cold cuts, soft cheeses and some pastries. My father took some eggs and a pretzel while my mother skipped eating for now.

With enough time to spare, my father decided he was going to take advantage of the open shower rooms in the lounge and signed up. This would be his second time showering at an airport with his first being in Bankok's Thai Airways lounge early last year.

Within a few minutes, the next available shower stall was clean and ready for him. Unlike the shower stalls at the gym, this Lounge shower room was quite nice - like a modern style hotel bathroom.

The attendant had given him a large bath towel, a new package of toiletries including a shaving kit and a toothbrush kit. The shower stall had a shampoo/body wash in one dispenser for his soap needs. Everything was running pretty smoothly. Even the shower pressure was quite nice, though the shampoo dispenser handle kept falling off when my father pressed it. Nevertheless, his quick 10 minute shower left him refreshed after a long 8 hours on a flight.

Now, if only he were smart enough to bring a clean set of clothes in his carry-on bags to change into...

Before we knew it, it was closer to 8:45 and our next flight would start boarding soon, so we left the lounge and started to make our way towards Gate G10 to catch our next flight to Rome, Italy.

Lufthansa's New Business Class

Flight #89 - Lufthansa 411
New York (JFK) – Munich (MUC)
Thursday, July 17, 2014
Depart: 5:25PM / Arrive: 7:35AM (+1 day)
Duration: 8hr 10min
Aircraft: Airbus 330
Seat: 3G, 3H, 3K (Business)
Earned: 0 miles (4,053 miles flown)
Cost:  100,000 miles + $163 / person
Redemption Value: 4.2 cents / mile
Lifetime Miles: 179,381 miles

It's finally time for our flight to Rome. As I mentioned earlier, we're flying on Lufthansa (so connecting in Munich) to our final destination. We could have flown on various routes to Rome, but we picked this JFK-MUC route specifically, because it would be served by Lufthansa's new business class product. How'd we know? We checked out the handy Lufthansa new business class seating website.

Remember, back in May 2013, we flew to/from Germany in Lufthansa business class as well. In fact, we were on this exact same route (LH 411 JFK-MUC). However, at that time, we flew on an Airbus 330 plane with Lufthansa's old business class product. You can see the blue seat color in the photos here.

Now, I'm definitely not complaining, because I completely realize that most people never have the chance to even travel, let alone fly in business or first class. But I'm still excited about getting to try the new and improved business class seats on the Lufthansa A330 plane.

"So what's the big difference," you ask?

Well, first, the new seats go down all the way so that when you're sleeping at night, it's easier to pretend like you're in a bed and not on a stretcher.

vs. 

Additionally, the in-flight entertainment system's screen is large and embedded in the seat in front of you - as opposed to our experience last year where the screens came out of the armrest.

 vs.

The tricky part is that the seats are arranged in groups of 2. So my mother and I will be fine sitting together along the window seats H and K in Row 3, but my father will be by himself across the aisle in Seat 3G with his feet angled towards next to his new seatmate.

 

When we arrived at the gate at the scheduled boarding time, we realized we were practically the last ones to board. Odd, but we just took our seats and got settled in. I like looking out the window at the water, so my mother took the aisle seat closer to my father.

 

As you can see, the seat adjusts in so many different permutations and combinations, it made my 2 year old head spin. But luckily, I had my mother to help me find my sweet spot.

About an hour and a half into the flight, they served us our dinners. I was pretty hungry so I went to town on my children's meal. My father on the other hand chose a pretty tasty (albeit dry) filet wrapped in prosciutto. Nothing to compare to the NYC steakhouses, but a great option for an in-flight meal.

My favorite part of dinner, however, was dessert. They had choices of cheese plates or fruit, but I went for the small cup of ice cream.

Pretty soon afterwards, they dimmed the lights, and I passed out for a few hours while my Asian father took out the camera and my mother photobombed me.

Before we knew it, they turned on the cabin lights and started to serve us breakfast. But instead of a tasty American style breakfast (bacon & eggs), they did it European style - cold cuts, fruit and cheese. Not my favorite but we couldn't complain given we just flew a redeye flight over to Germany in comfort and style.

I admit, I did wake up a few times during the 8 hour flight and definitely made some toddler crying noises. I was probably dreaming about having to fly in economy on our next big flight.

Since (a) I now have to pay for my own seat and (b) United raised prices for business and first class award tickets on partner flights, this trip will likely be our last time in a premium cabin. It's a shame the game ended early for us, but we're happy we were able to play for a few years.

So now, I'll just have to dream about flying in Lufthansa's amazing first class cabin. It won't be that hard, because as you can see from the seat map above, the first class cabin on our flight were just few feet in front of our Row 3 seats. And 7 of 8 of them were empty!

Business Class Flights with Bank Points

I don't know about my parents, but I've been really excited for our upcoming trip to Europe since February when we booked it using United frequent flyer miles just before the Great Devaluation.

For 100,000 miles each, my mother and I are flying in business class on Lufthansa to Rome, Italy and back from Athens, Greece. Our "out of pocket" cash costs are just $163 per person.

United Miles & Chase Ultimate Rewards
Two round-trip business class tickets on Lufthansa during peak summer season cost us 100,000 United miles + $163 cash each ticket (post-devaluation, they cost 140,000 miles now). A normal cash fare priced out at $4,326 per person, so each United award implied a 4.1 cent / mile redemption. Again, remember that United miles can be used to redeem on other Star Alliance airline partners, such as Lufthansa.

However, at the time of our February redemption, my father's United account only had about 30,000 miles. So he transferred 170,000 Chase Ultimate Reward points to his United account, and the miles showed up instantly.

He was able to do this transfer, because he had a Chase Sapphire Preferred credit card at the time. He also had a Chase Ink Bold credit card which would have worked as well. These premium Chase cards ($95 annual fee, but waived the first year) allow you to transfer UR points to United Airlines or Hyatt Hotels among other travel partners.

So the past few months of earning 2x UR points from our regular dining and travel spend meant we were essentially getting a 8.2% rebate from using our Chase Sapphire Preferred card. And the 5x bonus for using our Ink Bold card for our cell phone bills, cable/internet and office supply stores was earning us 20.5% rebates. Pretty impressive return for just paying your monthly bills, huh?

Citi Thank You Points

Of course, my mother and I wouldn't go to Europe without my dear father. And he wouldn't be too happy sitting back in coach while my mother and I flew upfront.

So he booked his own business class tickets on the exact same flights as ours. But instead of using United miles, he used his huge stash of Citi Thank You Points instead. A few reasons we booked his ticket separately like this:

1. We didn't have enough United miles to book 3 seats in business class (100,000 miles per person).
2. United didn't have 3 available award seats on the same flights.
3. Tickets bought with Citi Thank You Points are considered cash tickets.

His business class ticket cost 346,101 Citi Thank You Points, which was a fixed 1.25 cents/point redemption. But unlike my mother and me, my father would also earn his normal United miles and elite status credit for his premium cabin ticket -- flying 9,483 miles.

Since he has United Gold status, he would earn an additional 50% bonus on all his flights. Plus another 50% Premium cabin bonus for his Z fare class tickets on the return. So he would actually earn 16,721 United miles. Assuming those are only worth 2 cents/mile (vs. the 4.1 cents/mile rate we were just able to redeem at), that's another $334 of value. A free flight AND more frequent flyer miles! For redeeming bank points! Pretty sweet.

Now, 346,101 is still a lot of TY points, but since we had 12 months of a special 5x promotion on my father's Thank You Preferred Mastercard, we took advantage and racked up a ton of TY points in 2013 through manufactured spending techniques such as Vanilla Reloads and Amex Bluebird.

Now, this particular 5x promotion is no longer available anymore, but here's how my family took advantage of it when it was active. If it sounds a bit complicated, it's because it is to many people.

My father needed access to 4 different cards:

1. Citi Thank You Preferred
2. Vanilla Reloads
3. American Express Bluebird
4. Citi Thank You Premier

As mentioned in an earlier January post here, our Preferred card only gave us a super low 6,000 TY Point sign up bonus. But the devil is in the details. It also had a 5x bonus on all gas, grocery and drugstore spend for the first year. The wonderful thing for 2013 was that the drugstore CVS sold Vanilla Reload cards which could be used for Manufactured Spend if paired with the Amex Bluebird card. You can google this technique yourself, but basically, each $500 Vanilla Reload card purchase earned my father 2,500 Thank You Points (worth $25.00).

Then the $500 would be loaded onto the Bluebird card. Then the Bluebird card would pay off the $500 charge on the original Preferred card. So we didn't really "spend" anything in the end, but took advantage of the system to achieve our family goal of subsidized travel. Even after factoring in the $3.95 fee for each Vanilla Reload card, the scheme still generated $21.05 of profit per card.

Then since my mother also had the Thank You Premier card, we could redeem the points for 20% fewer points than normal. So instead of redeeming for 100 points for $1 of flight value, we could redeem just 80 points for that same $1 of value. Said another way, our Thank You points were now worth 1.25 cents/point instead of 1.00 cent/point. So the $25.00 of value each $500 Vanilla Reload card we purchased became $31.25 of value.

Now, $31.25 isn't a lot of money towards a flight to Europe, but when you do more than 1 Vanilla Reload card at a time (as we did during our Phoenix trip last year), you can start to see how scale-able this process can be. Each card shown below is worth $500 and earned us $31.25 worth in Thank You points.

Towards the last several months of our 12 month promotional period, we were "spending" about $15,000-18,000 a month, generating anywhere from 75,000-90,000 TY points each period. In case you're not Asian and need a calculator, that's about $938-1,125 in points each month. After a few months, my father had enough to book his tickets on our same Lufthansa flights.

One Last United MileagePlus Redemption

This past weekend, United Airlines implemented their new award redemption price chart, which frequent flyers have been dreading for the past few months.

For most people who use their United MileagePlus miles to redeem for economy award seats, the new pricing chart won't be much of a change (unless you're going to Hawaii).

However, for those people who were planning to redeem United miles for premium cabin seats on Star Alliance partners (i.e., Lufthansa, Thai, Swiss, ANA, Turkish), then this repricing is like pooping yourself without your diaper on. For example, our flight from Thailand on Asiana business class last year will now cost 160,000 miles round trip per person, up from just 120,000 miles when we took the trip (33% increase). Unfortunately, while we never had a chance to fly International First Class, some of those awards go from 140,000 miles round trip to a whopping 260,000 miles -- an 86% increase!

Graphic from Travel Summary

Of course, now that I'm over 2 years old, my family has to pay for my own seat on our trips. Meaning, we'd have to book 3 award seats now all at these new higher prices. As good as my father is at generating frequent flyer miles and points, we probably weren't going to be able to fly in business/first class anymore after the new pricing scheme took effect.

So with the deadline looming, he decided to pull to the trigger on one last premium cabin redemption for my parents' 5th wedding anniversary coming up this July. The good news was that there were actually some decent award flight options for the trip in mid-late July to Europe where they were looking. The bad news was that my father only had about 30,000 miles in his United account (after redeeming a bunch for our last minute trip to Israel last September).

Fortunately, we had a stash of Chase Ultimate Reward points built up from both my parents opening up 3 different Chase credit cards each and spending on them over the past two years.

So we found some sweet business class awards on Lufthansa from New York JFK to Rome (via Munich) on Lufthansa's A330 planes which should have their new business class seats. Baby Songer loves her lie-flat seating on overnight transatlantic flights.

The Stopover
Now we could have stayed in/around Rome for the entire trip, but we like taking advantage of United's flexible award routing rules. As you may recall, United lets you stop somewhere for up to 1 year before continuing on to your final destination. So we could have used Rome as our final destination, but we decided to use it as our stopover city instead.

Because we were flying on Lufthansa both ways, we'd have to connect back in Munich (or Frankfurt) on the return anyway. So it wouldn't matter where we were coming from as long as we got back to Germany to connect onto our final return flight to NYC.

My nerd father likes to have themes for his big trips.

• In 2012, it was Japan and Korea (historic enemies). 
• In 2013, it was Germany and France (another pair of historic enemies). 

So for 2014, we "needed" to find somewhere that fit in well thematically with Italy. Note: my father did notice that he seemed to be hitting all 3 of the World War II Axis Powers (Japan, Germany and Italy). To be fair though, that was 1 of the 100 questions my mother had to study for her U.S. Citizenship test.

Then an idea entered his mind. Italy & Greece. These two ancient power cultures formed the origins for all current socio-political intellectual thought in Western civilization. Of course today, the nations of Alexander the Great, Aristotle, Julius Caesar and Michelangelo are currently represented by slick Mediterraneans with excessive body hair and gold chain necklaces.

 vs. 

But my father had never been to Greece, so after looking up dates and flights that worked out to give us 5-6 nights in each place, here's what our trip will look like flying on Lufthansa and Aegean Airlines.

1. Thu July 17 - New York to Munich (Lufthansa Business) arriving July 18
2. Fri July 18 - Munich-Rome (Lufthansa Business) - STOPOVER
3. Wed July 23 - Rome-Athens (Aegean Business) - FINAL DESTINATION
4. Tue July 29 - Athens-Munich (Lufthansa Business)
5. Tue July 29 - Munich-New York (Lufthansa Business)

Total cost per person: 100,000 United miles + $163 cash. Had we waited til today to book this trip, it would have been 140,000 United miles + $163 cash. For those of you who are bad at math, that's an additional 120,000 miles for the 3 of us.

2013 Travel Year In Review

Well, it's the last day of 2013, and wow, I've had an amazing year. Since my father's an Asian math nerd, according to his excel spreadsheet, I have:

1. Flown approximately 84,860 miles this year.
2. Taken 48 flight segments (14 of which were 5-13 hours long).
3. Flown out of 32 airports.
4. On 12 different airlines.
5. Traveled to 10 foreign countries.
6. Earned 0 frequent flyer miles!

Of course, our #1 airline this year was United Airlines (14 flight segments), and we flew through Newark and JFK Airports most often (9 times each). My father earned United Gold Status and Aegean Airlines Blue Status for 2014, while my mother earned Aegean Airlines Gold Status and United Silver Status through 2014.

Most of our flights were paid for with out of pocket cash, though we did:

1. Save on my fare since I flew as a lap child for most of 2013;
2. Save $1,721 by using our Citi Thank You points for free flights to LA, Memphis and Phoenix;
3. Save another $1,348 by using British Airways Avios miles for our recent trip to Puerto Rico;
4. Taking advantage of mistake fares, such as the time we flew to Argentina on TAM for just $400/person (vs. $1,200/person normally); and 
5. Capitalize on United MileagePlus Awards for some of our long haul international business class flights (Thailand, Germany/France and Israel).

On the hotel side, we have:

1. Stayed 129 nights in hotels this year
2. Across 34 different cities
3. In 21 unique hotel brands

The hotel brands with the most stays was a tie between #1T Sheraton and #1T Hyatt Place (15 nights each) followed by #3 Westin (14 nights) and the #4T W Hotels (12 nights) and #4T Park Hyatt (12 nights, including the amazing Palacio Duhau Park Hyatt Buenos Aires seen here). This year we earned Starwood Platinum Status (50 nights) for 2014 and benefited from Hyatt Diamond Status (ending Feb 2014), Hilton Gold Status and Marriott Gold Status.

Now, while many of you may just assume we're millionaires, let me be clear - we are not! Because of the crafty use of hotel branded credit cards, sign up bonuses and seasonal promotions, we've been able limit the out of pocket cash expenditures. From the 129 nights spent in hotels this year, 28 of those nights were for work related travel and reimbursed ($5,060 spent for an average of $181/night). The remaining 101 nights were for "leisure" travel and cost us an average of $83/night in out of pocket cash from using free night awards and Cash & Point discounted rates.

A quick recap of some of our favorite photos from 2013.