A Weekend in Southeast Asia: Introduction

Last December, there was an interesting airfare to Singapore from Toronto with American Airlines.  The base fare was low enough to grab my attention, as it included the newish, long segments from Dallas / Ft. Worth (DFW) to Hong Kong on the new B777-300ER.  I had several newly acquired American eVIP, system wide upgrades burning a hole in my pocket, so I decided to see what I could do.

With an open weekend, I decided to try to put together the most convoluted routing possible to get me to Singapore.  The impressive part was that I was able to convince a couple of my travel junkie friends that this was a good idea, and they decided that a night in Hong Kong and a couple of nights in Singapore were completely reasonable for a weekend trip.

Anyway, with the help of one of said friends, I was able to route myself all over creation en route to Hong Kong and then Singapore.  Since the fare started in Toronto, the only logical routing for me would include the new American A321T transcontinental service between New York-JFK and Los Angeles before I backtracked back to Dallas.  I’d then meet my friends in Dallas before our 17.5 hour flight to Hong Kong.  We all managed to finagle in a 22-hour stopover in Hong Kong since it’s basically my favorite city on Earth.  The following day, we’d hop a four-hour Cathay Pacific flight from Hong Kong to Singapore, where we would spend two nights enjoying the legendary food in Singapore and recharge our jet-lagged selves at the Grand Hyatt Singapore.

The return would be the exact routing as my outbound.  It was a bit of a challenge to book, but with clever use of the multi-city booking tool on American’s website, I was able to put together the following masterpiece of an itinerary:

The ticket I purchased was a little more because of this asinine routing, but I ended up with the following:

• Washington (DCA)-Toronto (YYZ) (separate award)
• Toronto (YYZ) – New York (JFK)
• New York (JFK) – Los Angeles (LAX)
• Los Angeles (LAX) – Dallas / Ft. Worth (DFW)
• Dallas / Ft. Worth (DFW) – Hong Kong (HKG)
• Hong Kong (HKG) – Singapore (SIN)
• Singapore (SIN) – Hong Kong (HKG)
• Hong Kong (HKG) – Dallas / Ft. Worth (DFW)
• Dallas / Ft. Worth (DFW) – Los Angeles (LAX)
• Los Angeles (LAX) – New York (JFK)
• New York (JFK) – Washington (DCA) (separate ticket)

Now, that’s a weekend of flying, folks.

Of course, I’d have to position myself to Toronto from Washington-DCA, but that flight was easily acquired with the use of 4,500 British Airways Avios for use on a nonstop flight on US Airways.

As previously mentioned, the transcontinental segments (JFK-LAX and LAX-JFK) would be operated by the relatively new American A321T featuring American’s Flagship product.

The DFW-HKG and HKG-DFW segments would be operated by American’s newly delivered B777-300ER aircraft.  It’s the longest route that American flies.  It’s the longest route flying into Hong Kong.  And it’s the longest route that I’ve ever flown at 8,123 miles (17.5 hours) each way.

Now, this whole trip – the fact that I’d be doing it in a weekend (depart Thursday, return Monday) would seem absolutely sadistic except for the fact that I planned to use a couple of American eVIP Systemwide Upgrades.  The DFW-HKG flights are notoriously difficult upgrades to clear, but as luck would have it, I cleared the upgrade on the outbound segment about four days prior to the flight.  Luckily, all my other segments on the outbound also cleared, meaning I was riding up front for the duration of the outbound.

The return… well, the return was a much more dicey situation, but it all worked out in the end.  All upgrades cleared and the whole trip was in business class or domestic first class making this entire journey just about as comfortable as possible.

I’ll follow up this post with a number of trip reports on individual segments.  I slept right through several of the segments, so I obviously won’t have anything to say about those.  Overall, we had a blast in our one night in Hong Kong, and we really enjoyed ourselves in Singapore.

Would I do it again?  Well — if I could be guaranteed that my upgrades to business class would clear, then I would consider it.  Otherwise, would I this trip in coach?  At almost 28,000 flown miles in a weekend?  Well, that would be just pure torture.

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A Weekend in Southeast Asia

• Introduction
• American Business Class New York-JFK to Los Angeles
• American Business Class Dallas / Ft. Worth to Hong Kong
• A Layover in Hong Kong and a Quick Flight to Singapore
• Two Nights in Singapore at the Grand Hyatt Singapore
• Cathay Pacific Premium Economy Singapore to Hong Kong
• American Business Class Hong Kong to Dallas / Ft. Worth
• American Business and First Class Dallas to Los Angeles to New York-JFK