Questions and Answers

Hi Lucky,

Thanks for a great website. I was hoping you (or some other reader) could help me out with my situation.

I have a 380k Alaska miles and my wife and I based in Seattle have twin 2 month old girls. We would like to fly somewhere exciting this winter (doesn’t need to be a specific week), however, because of the babies we want to fly first/business class (which we don’t usually do). My questions are:

– It seems like our best option is to fly somewhere with Emirates. We are excited about flying to the Seychelles (SEZ). However, in February/March there are no business class flights for both legs (SEA-DXB and DXB-SEZ). However, I have noticed that there consistently seems to be availability a few days before departure. How risky would it be to schedule time off of work, book hotels in the Seychelles, and simply book our flight a few days before departure?

– Any suggestions for better ways to search for business/first class flights? It is tedious to search because most results are mixed cabin or >40 hours connections

– Any suggestions for other destinations that we could fly first class to that might have business/first class availability right now?

Cheers,

Erik

[USER=765]@Erik Henne[/USER]

Congratulation on becoming a father.

Are you planning to travel with the children as lap child or in their own seats?

Remember that Emirates charge 10% of the adult revenue fare for lap children in J or F.

There was an article written about it last year, strongly recommend you read it before booking anything.

[URL]http://onemileatatime.boardingarea.com/2014/09/17/infant-award-travel/[/URL]

Too put it bluntly, I have never travel with a lap child on a Alaska mileage ticket so my understanding of the subject is purely academic.

That said BA might be you best bet for using the points you already have with Alaska for premium travel, but you might need BA avios to book the lap child part of the ticket directly with BA since Alaska does not issue partner infant tickets. Might need a true expert opinion from Tiffany or Travis if this is possible.

For the future it might be a good idea to realign your credit card strategy since you will be traveling with lap children for a while yet.

[USER=765]@Erik Henne[/USER] — Welcome! Depending on the route, you can almost always plan on space opening up before departure, but in winter or around the holidays it is going to be tough.

Have you looked at space out of other hub cities? You don’t really want to fly Emirates business class out of Seattle anyway, particularly with lap children, so I’d look at space out of San Francisco or Dallas and see if that helps.

Once you have an idea of space, then you’ll want to look up the costs for the infant tickets, as [USER=268]@No Name[/USER] mentioned — this will be pricey, so you’ll want to factor that in as well.