Trip Report Contents
Intro & Planning: How planning a trip to Hanoi got us to Tasmania (This Installment)
Introduction &
Planning (How planning a trip to Hanoi got us to Tasmania)
Quick Summary: Because Delta
points are so difficult to use, we couldn’t use them to get to Hanoi and
decided to instead go to Australia; we ended up with a ten-day trip to the
southern third of the Island of Tasmania.
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Planning a Special Trip to Vietnam Australia
We began planning for Philip’s
[March] birthday the previous September.
We wanted to use some of my Delta points to go to Vietnam. Although more people than ever are going from
the US to Vietnam for vacations, it’s still a destination that is a bit on the
exotic side. But, as we would discover,
the real oddity in our plan wasn’t our destination but was trying to use Delta
points to get there.
I began calling asking for a date
range, which became more flexible with each call. Over the course of a couple of months I began
to just ask for “two business class seats from any US gateway anytime during
March.” That seemed flexible enough to
me; it wasn’t flexible enough for Delta, though. The best they were ever able to do priced out
at over 750,000 points for two tickets, and that for an itinerary that was just
horrible and didn’t work at all. So, it
was back to the drawing board.
More looking and research brought
me to the discovery that Delta points are pretty easy to spend to go to
Australia on Virgin Australia. Oddly
enough, flying using Delta points on Delta to Australia would have cost a
fortune, but flying there using Delta points on Virgin Australia, at 150,000
points each, was a relative bargain. (As
an aside, Delta points are notoriously difficult to use.)
Philip had never been very
interested in going to Australia: he
thought it a long way to go to be in cities that we imagined to be very much
like American cities. Somehow, during my
research, the idea of Tasmania came to me.
It was very rural, naturally beautiful, exotic, and about as far away as
we could get and still be on the planet.
And, when I looked at using points, it was really easy and pretty cheap. (I wrote about this back in November, and you can read that here.)
Before much longer we were booked
from Los Angeles to Hobart, through Melbourne, all in business class. Over the next few months I kept calling back
and managed to get the flights from DC to LAX added on, but never got the
return, so, eventually, we just bought our own tickets back from LA.
Our Itinerary
As we planned things out, our first
thought was to see as much of the island as possible. More research showed that we were way too
ambitious and that we’d end up seeing nothing but highway as we shuttled from
place to place. We eventually came round
to a more modest plan that, as it turns out, could have still used more paring
back.
Our itinerary as we finally booked
it would have taken us out on a Wednesday evening. We’d overnight near LAX that night and spend
all day Thursday in LA, before getting a late flight out to Melbourne that
night. From Melbourne we’d fly onward to
Hobart (Tasmania), arriving mid-day Saturday.
We’d fly back home the following Saturday, picking up an American
Airlines flight in LA for the trip back from the West Coast.
On Tasmania, we’d spend three
nights in Hobart, then drive across the island to Strahan (pronounced “Straw-n,”
like “drawn,” but with an “S”), spend three nights there, and then a quick
overnight near the Hobart airport before our early morning flight out the
following Saturday. But, alas, what is
it they say about the best-laid plans?
Exactly, and ours were indeed laid to waste.
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Our planned flight
path: Washington National to Detroit to
Los Angles to
Melbourne to Melbourne to Hobart to Melbourne to Los Angeles
to
Dallas to Washington National
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