I’m hoping the answer is at least four.
I’ve written about my #firstworldproblem struggle this year trying to decide whether to go for American’s highest Elite Rewards tier, which would earn me a total of 100,000 bonus AAdvantage miles, or whether to go for Alaska MVP Gold 75K status (as opposed to MVP Gold status), which would give me higher upgrade priority on Alaska plus 50,000 bonus miles.
I had kind of mentally settled on just going for Executive Platinum with American and MVP Gold with Alaska and forgetting about my higher “aspirations,” but then last week Delta published $900 business class fares between Sao Paulo and the US. Originally I just assumed it was a promotion and not a mistake, since we’ve seen plenty of ridiculous low fares to and from South America this year, but given that they pulled it within a few hours I assume it was a mistake. Now, the great thing about Delta is that they’re an Alaska partner, so this could be a great way to rack up elite qualifying miles with Alaska.
I decided I wanted to do at least one of them, since it would help me requalify for MVP Gold with Alaska, but beyond that also because the route is operated by Delta’s new business class product, and I’ll be the first to admit that I don’t do enough SkyTeam trip reports. This seemed like a great opportunity to write one.
But this fare is from Sao Paulo and not to Sao Paulo, so positioning is required. Now I actually don’t mind positioning to Sao Paulo either, since it’s one of only two international destinations to which American flies their new 777-300ERs featuring their new fully flat business class, and fares are quite reasonable as well.
But here’s the thing about flights that require positioning — if you’ve already paid for the positioning flights, you might as well do more than one of the actual “mistake fare” mileage runs. So I booked three of them on Delta, meaning over the course of about eight days I’ll be flying back and forth to Brazil four times.
Now, I actually think it’ll be rather relaxing since all the flights will be operated by business class seats that go fully flat, but the thing I’m most concerned about is the ~10 hours I “sit” in Sao Paulo. I’m doing a couple of days in Sao Paulo on the first trip, but beyond that am trying to decide how bad it’ll be sitting in the terminal for that long, or if I should just get a day room at the airport Marriott.
After this nobody will be able to say I’m neglecting SkyTeam anymore. 😉
Anyone else get in on this fare?
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