Award Travel

Sounds like a good thing, you are being awarded for something...right? That is what it is called when you book airline tickets using award miles that you have earned via your particular airline loyalty card. Some restrictions apply. In our case, flying to Barcelona, Spain from Orlando, FL was a total of 17 hours of total travel time.

We booked a British Airways flight with "award" miles from its partner American Airlines. This meant an overnight flight to London Gatwick Airport (7 hours and 45 min flight), an 8 hour layover in London and then on to Barcelona (2 hour flight) arriving Barcelona at around 9PM. This was the best itinerary available for "award" tickets.

Some carriers now charge you a per seat premium to pre-book any seat assignment more than 24 hours before your flight, including British Airways. If you don't pay, you can only select your seat at the time of check in. We debated the relative virtue of the $90 ($45 pp) on an 8 hour overnight flight, kept checking the seat map every couple of days to see who was shelling out the extra money. It looked to us like no one else wanted to pay the advance seat fee either. We checked in 24 hours in advance, got aisle seats in the bulkhead middle row with an empty seat between us. Now we wait to see if the gamble of getting a row to ourselves pays off.

After an uneventful 1 hour shuttle ride to the Orlando airport at rush hour, we dropped off our two suitcases to be checked through to Barcelona and proceeded through a rather short security line to our gate. Our flight departed on-time, feeling really lucky now. PAYDIRT...a whole row to ourselves. It did not make sleeping on the flight any better but we had legroom and an extra tray table to place our wine.

We had a great selection of movies to pass the time. I watched 12 Years A Slave (terribly moving and devastatingly sad), then needed to refill my "happy" tank so I selected Saving Mr. Banks (how can you not smile at Tom Hanks as Walt Disney). We got a rough hour or two of sleep then we were in London.

Mike had hoped that we could find a reasonably easy way to get into London to spend the hours of our layover.  There was no easy way to store the bags we carried on and London Gatwick is not as close as Heathrow to the city, so we decided to hang out at the airport.

Luckily, we have a membership card that gets us into some airline clubs across the globe. We quickly checked into a very large club with reasonably substantial free snacks, drinks and wi-fi (the Traveler's Trifecta). Bleary-eyed, we mindlessly ate and drank every hour or so to fend of sleep and boredom, caught up on current events on-line, read our books and people watched. It was a very busy place and many people came and went while we spent 7 hours there awaiting our flight to Spain.

The flight from London to Spain landed a little early at approximately 9PM , about 24 hours from our departure from Orlando. Hola Barcelona!