For our honeymoon, K & I were cashing in the miles that I’d accumulated during my milage runs outlined Here, Here, Here, and Here, as well as those earned for traveling for work. All in all we had enough miles to get us to and from Asia in first class (traveling on OneWorld partners), so I started looking at options. After a decent amount of research we had settled on Hanoi and Bali. Now, that might seem like an odd choice, but we wanted to go someplace and do touristy stuff, and then go someplace to relax. Our 4 days in Hanoi would let us see some of the city (hit the highlights) and then 9 days in Bali (split between Ubud and Seminyak) would give us quite a lot of time to move at a slower pace.
With our destinations set upon, I set out to find our flights. Due to not having the required number of miles when the schedule opened at 330 days out, first class seats on the transpacific flights were scarce (more like nonexistent), so the first iteration of our itinerary had us flying in business class from Boston to Dallas, then Tokyo, and finally Hanoi, and then Bali to Hong Kong in economy, Hong Kong to LAX (business for me, first for K), and finally LAX to Boston for the return. Not the best routings by any mean. But, as those who redeem miles for flights know, the initial itinerary is not the one that you usually fly, and it takes a lot of patience (and calls in to American) to tweak, segment by segment, to get to what you really want. In our case, that was either the non-stop Boston to Tokyo (and then the same Tokyo to Hanoi flight) or the JFK to Tokyo flight in first class, for the way over, and then Bali to Hong Kong (in business, as Cathay doesn’t fly first on this route), and then non-stop Hong Kong to Boston flight in first. Rather than fly too far out of the way from Hanoi to Bali, we decided to purchase tickets on Singapore Airlines as the cost was pretty fair.
Luckily, Cathay Pacific gave us an early wedding gift by increasing the frequency on the Hong Kong/Boston flight, which meant I could switch our Hong Kong/LAX/Boston mess (as well as a very short overnight in LAX) to the direct flight. Now, the Cathay first class cabin is only six seats, so they only release one that far in advance, so while K was seated up in first, I was still in the business class mini-cabin. Shortly thereafter, a business class seat opened up on the Bali to Hong Kong flight, which I once again gave to K to complete her itinerary (happy wife, happy life. Right? 😉 ).
With the flights mostly settled, I turned to hotels. Hanoi was the easiest, our criteria were cheap and well located. While we could have gone cheaper, we settled on the Hanoi Pearl hotel for ~$60/night. This afforded us a double bed (instead of two singles or a twin) as well as breakfast each morning. The Bali hotels were a little more difficult as we had some more criteria to take into consideration. We had decided that we wanted to split our time between Ubud and Seminyak to get two different views of Bali (Ubud is up in the mountains towards the center of Bali, while Seminyak is beachside and much more touristy). In Ubud we wanted a private villa with our own pool and views of the terraced rice patties. Our requirements in Seminyak were that we have an ocean view (and no street between us and the beach). Ubud hotels matching our requirements were pretty easy to find, and after a bit of further research we chose a pool villa at the Puri Sebali Resort. Turning to Seminyak, I realized that meeting our needs was going to put us in a slightly higher price point than we’d originally been looking at. We discussed it, and decided that since this was a once in a lifetime event, we should splurge. I’d received some recommendations online and from relatives, and The Legian Bali kept coming up. It looked amazing, and all the reviews were amazing, so I booked it as well.
Since I’d gone through Hotels.com, I emailed all of the hotels to confirm the reservations. This is where The Legian started to shine. The other hotels confirmed that they had our reservations and offered transfers from/to the airport, but that was mostly it. The Legain also confirmed and asked about transportation, but then started collecting details about our stay. They inquired who else would be there, and when I explained that we would be on our honeymoon, they congratulated us asked if they should refer to K by her maiden name or her new last name (a very nice touch since she would be traveling under her maiden name since there wasn’t time to do the paperwork before we left). My emails to them were always answered very promptly even given the large time difference between them and us.
It wasn’t until the week before the wedding that the final pieces of our outbound flights fell into place. I’d been checking periodically to see if the BOS to NRT flight had any openings, but had been striking out. Really, I wanted to avoid the 2:30am wake-up that we’d have if we stuck on our current BOS-DFW-NRT route. However, one day my BA award search showed a pair of JL F openings on their JFK-NRT flight, and after a frantic call to AA, we now had a 6am wake-up and trimmed our NRT layover from 6hrs to 2 (though I wouldn’t have minded a little more…). The other treat of this routing (other than the obvious business to first upgrade) was that AA has been using a 321T on some of the BOS-JFK hops, so we’d have a fully lie-flat international J seat for our 40min flight.
And with that it was time to get married and set out on an amazing journey! Up next, the beginning of our adventure.
Cheers,
-N
Have Wine Key, Will Travel 