A couple of days ago, I mentioned to Maxine that we needed to start looking into air flights for the South American cruise. The cruise included a discounted Economy air with Stephen T and I flying out of IAH and Stephen H and Sarah flying out of IAD. Since it was going to be a 10+ hour flight, I told Maxine I wanted to fly Business Class both directions. She contacted Viking and they told her that they could upgrade us to Business Class for a new cost of $4,700 each compared to the $1,195 for economy. I told Maxine I would check with Chase Travel to see if we could do any better. I found the costs to be about the same, so I told Maxine to go ahead and use Viking since it would include transfers.
Maxine called back to say that in the 30 minutes between the initial Viking quote and her return call, the price had gone up $2,000 each. She told them to forget it. Thus started a saga of options and frustrations. Bottom line, we ended back with Viking, everyone traveling Business Class from IAH to EZE (Buenos Aires) and Economy Plus from SCL (Santiago) to IAH. The cost is $2,992.50 each. I will fly Stephen and Sarah from IAD to HOU.
For the flight from IAH to EZE, we will be on a Boeing 777 flight #819, seats 3A, 3B, 4A, 4B.
On the return trip, we on a Boeing 767-300, tentatively in seats 30K, 30L, 31K, 31L.
Update: I learned that, when selecting Economy, there is NO Economy Plus option through Viking. You can only select Economy. Then you can decide to go onto the airline web site and upgrade to Economy Plus. To do this, Viking first has to write the tickets which they normally would not do until 60 days or so before the trip begins. For our trip, this would be around the first of October. Not wanting to chance the possibility of not having a good seat selection, I went ahead and asked Maxine to have Viking write the tickets. They did and I immediately went on the United site and upgraded to Economy Plus @ $162/seat. Our seats are now 18A/18B/19A/19B. These are on the port side and should avoid the morning sun. The flight leaves Santiago at 11:20pm on December 21 and arrives in Houston at 6:00 am on December 22. I will need to wait until June or July before I can book flights between Washington and Houston for Stephen and Sarah.
