Weekend Blitz

Note:  These are bookable now. Don’t miss out on Flying Blue’s summer promo, which allows you to book Air France/KLM awards for 25-50% less than normal in October & November 2014:

Award bookings on Air France/KLM routes have been reduced by 25-50% for travel between October 1 – November 30, 2014.

For those of us sitting in ‘Merica, we’ll be most interested in:

Even though we had a full night’s layover in Frankfurt (see our adventures in Frankfurt here), Jeffrey casanova’d our way into the First Class Lounge at Frankfurt’s airport, duh. Be forewarned that we had just visited the Lufthansa First Class lounge in New York-JFK and this post will make lots of comparisons: Lufthansa First Class Lounge – New York-JFK Airport.

Frankfurt Airport is one of the three mega-hubs in Europe, with more than 52 million passengers/year, 60% of which are Lufthansa travelers (that’s about 100,000 Lufthansa travelers per day!).

Given the above stats, it’s not surprising that they’re a bit stingy with access to [...]

Booking

I had a conference here and booked a 3 night stay about 4.5 months in advance. I was able to get a corporate rate of $125 per night.

Check-in

I booked a 2 Queen room and, despite there being a large conference for the next few nights and the Coachella music festival starting on the weekend, rooms were still available for for the length of my stay. The agent said that they were able to give me an “upgrade” to a Deluxe golf course view room (Deluxe golf, non-smoking:  2 Queen Beds, 525 sq ft / 49 m²) but, after I asked, said that a suite upgrade wouldn’t be possible due to the high occupancy. I confirmed this on the Starwood app:  a [...]

I stumbled across a cool website the other day:  Rome2Rio.com.

Rome2Rio is basically a multimodal transport search engine. It answers that nagging question: “what is the best way to get from point A to B?” But the “best way” is still left for you to decide, taking into account travel time vs cost.

The great thing about the site is that it gives you door-to-door approximations including estimated fuel cost for driving and fares for buses, planes, taxi, trains, ferries, etc…

Use it to explore all travel options with total times and prices

So, here’s an example of how it’s useful:  I’ll do a search for a [...]

Everyone wants to travel light these days, avoiding the hassle of checking bags. Just the other day, Jeffrey’s bags were accidentally loaded onto the next plane, so we had to wait at our destination airport for the next plane from Charleston to arrive. If you’re on a quick weekend getaway, I think you can pack just in a carry-on… with room to spare! This way, you’ll avoid waiting at baggage claim and star your adventure sooner!

As we wrote about on Friday, IHG released a preview list of their PointBreaks promotion which allows you to book select properties for just 5,000 points per night.  Well, The IHG/PriorityClub PointBreaks list for August and September 2014 is now live and you can head here to book it: IHG PointBreaks. If you don’t see the new properties on the site immediately, you should go directly to the property’s website and attempt a booking.

Check out the full list and easy to use map but heading to our post from a few days ago here: Preview: IHG/PriorityClub PointBreaks List Aug-Sep 2014.

Some of the better deals include the 5 Intercontinental hotels on the [...]

While in the Lufthansa First Class lounge in New York-JFK, we had to scurry and find a place to stay in Frankfurt the following night. Since we had just switched our flights hours before take off, we didn’t have very much notice but were very glad to have an opportunity to visit Frankfurt–a new city!

Booking

Because I have Diamond status with Hyatt and Platinum status with Starwood, I preferred to book a property at either one of those chains. When I jumped online, I found that my only Hyatt option for “Frank…” would be Franklin, Tennessee:

The good news is that Starwood has a few more options: