Trip Introduction: Another Lap Around Earth In Business Class Using Points (NYC to Singapore)

Introduction

When life gives you lemons, fly 24 hours to Singapore? What am I doing with my life.

A few months ago, I had a South America trip lined up, but due to some external life circumstances it was cancelled last minute. That left me with an open week of PTO I still had to figure out what to do with. So, as anyone reasonable with a stash of points would do, I opened up seats.aero to see what routes had last minute award availability. I had three goals:

1. Make a pit stop in LA to visit friends
2. Go somewhere cool for a few days, although limited to just one spot due to my small amount of free time here
3. Try out new business class products I haven’t flown yet

In this post, you’ll find:

My Itinerary and How I Paid

So, just a few days before my PTO started, I ended up booking the following itinerary, with all long-haul flights in business class. Points are great because you can do crazy trips like this last minute, often times in premium cabins, whereas this would have been prohibitively expensive using cash. Reviews of everything to come. Going from NYC to LA to Singapore in a week is fairly brutal on the body, so I definitely would recommend doing this over a longer period of time if you’re trying to do something similar. But hey, life is short, and when you get to lie flat on the plane it definitely makes it easier.

My final itinerary ended up being:

5/23: JFK – LAX in JetBlue Economy. Paid in cash ($273 – pretty pricey for a one way transcon, and ironically my most expensive flight of the trip on a cash basis)

5/26: LAX – HND – BKK in JAL Business Class. Paid 70,000 AAdvantage Points + $17.20. Sweet deal

5/28: BKK – SIN in Economy. Paid in cash for $117 USD. Hard to beat Singapore Airlines, even in economy.

6/2: SIN – ZRH – EWR in Business. SIN – ZRH on Swiss, and ZRH-EWR in United Polaris. Paid 87,500 Air Canada Aeroplan points and $139 USD in taxes and fees.

Here’s a map of my itinerary:

In total, this would shake out to 22,041 miles, roughly 1 x lap around the earth in a week.

How I Found These Flights & Trip Highlights

When you have a defined block of free time and a stash of miles, life becomes a lot more fun because you can, for the most part, go anywhere on Earth within a 48 hour notice. This is why I recommend always keeping a stash of points available for last minute trips, in case life gives you some unexpected free time.

Also, award availability often gets better last minute, so if anything it’s disadvantageous to plan things far in advance. I found my flights on seats.aero, which is my favorite tool for finding availability (and also daydreaming where you can go in business class for cheap on a whim).

However, as you’ll notice by the itinerary, it wasn’t perfect as I needed to add a positioning flight between Bangkok and Singapore. However, this route is super competitive and cheap, so it all worked out well.

Here are some of my highlights from the trip, and reviews of everything to come: