A Disney Parks Around the World Journey: The Planning Part IV

Read the planning from the beginning here or just the previous article here.

Read about how the trip turned out on the semi-live blog here.

For those just tuning in, here’s a quick one sentence recap of what happened in our last episode of Disney Trek: Warp Speed through the Parks. Bottom line, I had missed out on the initial release of discount business class seats on Zipair despite waiting on them for OVER 5 MONTHS!!! Now I was a little perturbed about what my next step would be as our original plan that I had so meticulously planned had hit a snag. I started looking for what other US destinations Zipair flies to as I just didn’t care before because it didn’t matter. I now realized they also flew to San Francisco and San Jose.

Both of those are just a short flight to LAX, and luckily they had not yet released the bookings for those seats. In investigating the award availability for SFO or SJC to LAX there was ample award space on Delta, United, and Alaska from SFO to LAX. So now with another option, we still had a second chance to get a reasonably priced business class flight back to the US. All hope was not yet lost.

I then signed up for a free trial on a website monitoring service, Visual Ping. This is website monitoring service that detects changes in websites and then notify you if there is a change.

I set it to monitor the notifications page of ZipAir which is where they will post the press release that they have opened bookings for San Francisco or San Jose, and then I would get a text and an email that there were changes to the website.

So we waited, and waited, and waited some more for the flights to be released. As luck would have it, we eventually left the country for a trip to Europe and the flights still had not yet been released. This presented an issue because we were going to be on a cruise ship and the cellular connection on a cruise is not exactly the greatest and is also not exactly cheap. For that reason I recruited my mother to also receive notifications and book the flights when they went live if I was unable to do so because the text message did not go through, I was in the middle of a tour, sleeping, or some other reason.

As fate would have it, the flights went live while I was sleeping and the ship was sailing so my cell connection was down. My mother received the notification and attempted to check out but had some issues with credit card authorization, which can be an issue with Japanese companies. By the time she had the issue resolved, there were no seats available. So in short, we failed again. Whomp, whomp….

When I woke up and found out what had happened, I just about died as we had struck out for the second time. I still checked the website as more often than not at least a couple people cancel in the 24 hour free cancellation window. Luckily, there were still a couple seats available for both SJC and SFO when I checked. Unfortunately, all the lowest price tiers were gone, but there were still seats available at $1577 per person, or about $4731 dollars for 3 people. This was a little over double the $750 I was hoping for. Given the cost of the airfare for the rest of the trip was only about $2100 after all the taxes and fees, we made the decision to just go ahead and book it, as we were running well under budget for our airfare costs. Even though it wasn’t a screaming deal, for business class during a peak season it was still very reasonably priced compared to the $11,000+ dollar prices on other airlines with much longer itineraries and layovers.

After taxes, seat selection fees, and opting for the “Flex Biz” option that allowed us to get an airline credit if we cancelled, the final price ended up at $5,332 dollars. Of note, ZipAir is truly a low cost carrier in that their confirmation email, could NOT BE ANYMORE STRIPPED DOWN. I didn’t think that some basic presentation would cost that much, but apparently every kilobyte counts in the world of a low cost carrier.

After booking the ZipAir flights from NRT to SFO, I started to investigate what our points and miles options were to fly to the Los Angeles area. There were several reasonably priced redemptions that would cost about 10,000 miles per person in economy. While I always prefer to use miles when I can I still compare the cash price to see if it’s worth paying cash. For this short flight there was one cash price that did catch my eye. Alaska Airlines had a fare of $183 per person for domestic first class from San Francisco to John Wayne International Airport.

For those not familiar with the Los Angeles Airports, John Wayne International is the closest airport to Disneyland being a short 15 min. drive compared to LAX which is 45 minutes and can balloon with traffic. It is also notably smaller, making it easier to get into and out of. I’m not big on paying cash when there are miles redemptions available, but both Kendall and I each had $300 dollar travel credit with Capital One we needed to use, and you either use it or you lose it. Unfortunately, In order to use the credit the flights must be booked using the Capital One portal.

I am not a fan of booking via travel portals as we have had some bad experiences, but I’ll make an exception to use the travel credit. We booked the flights using our travel credit, however, due to the credits being under separate accounts, in order to use them we needed to split our reservation. Kendall and Lucy would be on one reservation, for a total of $366 which after the $300 travel credit was $66 out of pocket. I booked mine separately, and the credit covered it completely with some leftover. Now had we booked with points and miles, the fees alone would have been the 30,000 miles plus $17 in taxes and fees. In essence, we ultimately only paid $49 to fly domestic first class for that segment and saved our 30,000 miles to fight another day.

At the beginning of this trip we rented DVC points from David’s Vacation Club Rentals for our stay at the Polynesian, and to end the trip we also rented points for our stay at the The Villas at Disneyland Hotel. For this stay, we used DVC-Rental.com as they had the availability for the points we needed to stay at the Disneyland hotel.

Since we will cross the international dateline, while we leave Tokyo on January 4th at 9:25PM, we will time travel back in time, just on a 787 and not a Delorean sadly, and land in San Francisco 8 hours prior to leaving at 1:30PM on the same day. We then continue on via Alaska Airlines which departs at 4:46PM and lands at 6:19PM. We clearly needed at least one day at the parks which would be January 5th, and as such we decided to book a two night stay leaving on January 6th. We could only do one day because on January 6th my daughter’s school starts back up and she already missed 1.5 days at school at the beginning and this will add 1 more day to her absences. In total she will miss 2.5 days of school. I guess that’s a small price to pay to circumnavigate the globe and see all the Disney Parks.

As has been the case for the majority of the resorts on this trip, this is peak season and as such the prices were at an absolute peak. We ended up booking a Studio Standard View, and it would have cost a monstrous $1842 for 2 nights if we had booked with cash.

By renting DVC points we paid $725 for 2 nights or $362.50 per night at the Disneyland hotel for a total savings of $1,117. It honestly felt like a steal for this time of year given that even off peak weekday pricing at Disneyland Hotel runs $500+ after taxes. For those keeping track, we saved $3,319 dollar by renting DVC points. We have found renting points to be the best of both worlds for us.

Our plan is to go to Disney California Adventure and Disneyland on January 5th, park hopping between the two to complete the final 11th and 12th park, thus ending our quest to do all 12 parks in one trip over Christmas break. In order to assist with accomplishing as much as possible for this portion of our trip, we plan to get the Lightning Lane Premier Pass which just launched a month ago.

This brand new Lightning Lane Pass allows you access to all the Lightning Lanes in both parks, with one use per attraction. Given we only have one day, and want to maximize our time, this is exactly what we need. More importantly, it doesn’t involve us paying for another VIP tour, which I’m sure we will love, but again not something we have the budget for every time.

As is the theme of the trip, anything that adds convenience adds cost. The price of these passes run between $349-$399 per person depending on the time of year. Given it is the end of the holiday season it will assuredly be $399 per person for a total of $1197. Thankfully, to help offset the cost, one of my friend’s wife is a Cast Member at Disneyland, and is using her Cast Member benefit to get us into Disneyland for free. The one day park hopper for 2 adults and 1 child for January 5th is $844 after taxes, so I am ETERNALLY grateful for the efforts she made to get us a Cast Member friends and family reservation on that date.

In order to get home, I initially had booked via the Turkish Airlines Miles & Smiles points program. I managed to find a flight home out of LAX with a layover in Denver ending in Louisville, KY which is a 3 hour drive from our home for 7,500 miles and $5.60 per person. For this I transferred my Capital One miles to Turkish Airlines, as I do not organically earn Turkish miles being that we live in the US and do not use Turkish Airlines often.

It ended up being a total of 22,500 miles and $17 dollars to get back across the US, which was an absolute bargain. We would then take a one way car rental to get back to our home. However, this flight left at 5:37 AM, and Disneyland closes at midnight on January 5th. Since we only have one day to do Disneyland and California Adventure, we likely would close down the park to try and maximize our time and do as many rides and attractions we could. With a 5:37 AM flight, this puts us leaving the hotel at about 3:00 AM. We would be lucky to get an hour or two of sleep at best before we’d need to wake up to get ready to head to the airport. This sounded incredibly PAINFUL and after the gauntlet we had just run, could think of no worse way to end our trip.

So I continued to look for other options. I set up some award alerts via Award Tool, an award flight search engine, to notify me if some reasonably priced reward redemptions were released.

A couple months passed and eventually, I got a hit and an alert popped up. I lucked out in that the found redemption happened to be on American Airlines for only 6,000 miles and $11.20 in fees. This is the cheapest possible redemption American offers. As an added bonus it was from John Wayne International to our HOME airport, Huntington Tri-State Airport, which is just a 25 minute drive from our home and where we originated our around the world adventure. It did have a 5 hour layover in Charlotte, but that was a small price to pay to fly to our home airport, rather than having to drive 3 hours back home after landing.

I will tell you there is NOTHING worse than landing at an airport 2.5-3 hours from your home at 10:30 PM and then having to drive home that same night. So finding something that got us closer to home was GOLD!

Initially, the upgrade offer was over $1,000 per person to go from coach to domestic first class which is just crazy in my opinion for a domestic first class upgrade. I monitored the price over the next several months and it eventually dropped into the $500 range which I still wasn’t gonna bite. It did continue fall and eventually hit $242, and that caught my attention as LAX-CLT clocks in at almost 5 hours of flight time so it’s not exactly a short flight. So that got my brain churning.

The flight time was not that much better at 7:25AM, but it was infinitely better than 5:37AM and it was a closer smaller airport that allows us to sleep a little longer. So now for a total of 18,000 miles and $33 in fees we could fly to our home airport from Los Angeles. It really doesn’t get better than that in the points and miles redemption world to be totally honest. To be totally honest, the idea of going around the world starting at Huntington Tri-State airport is nearly just mind boggling in and of itself.

Several weeks later, I get a notification that there was a change to our flight time. Our flight from Charlotte to Huntington’s departure had changed from 8:15PM to 10:50PM lengthening our layover by 2.5 hours to make our layover a whopping 7.5 hours. Normally, I would be a little deflated by an extension of an already long layover, but I instead I was screaming YES!

That was because this was EXACTLY what I had been waiting for! For anyone that manages airline reservations regularly, a flight change of this length is absolute gold.

It varies by airlines, but typically a flight change of 45-60 minutes allows you to now call the airline and request a new flight without paying any fees or differences in airfare. As such I now knew I had free rein to call and pick a more desirable flight time. I then started looking at what options American had out of the Los Angeles area airports. I eventually found a 1:40 PM flight of LAX that allowed us to sleep in after a long park day and only had a 1.5 hour layover in Charlotte. This got us back to our home airport after our globe hopping trip a little past midnight at 12:17 AM on January 7th.

And as such the final piece of our around the world flight plan fell into place.

I managed to book it almost exclusively with points and miles and credit card travel credits in international business or domestic first class. The only exceptions were the initial Allegiant flight to Sanford and the Tokyo to San Francisco segment on Zipair. I could finally rest and quit stalking flight search engines.

In theory, I could have used my Capital One purchase eraser, which essentially let’s you redeem your miles on a 1 mile = 1 cent basis, which would roughly be around 560,000 Capital One miles or so, but that is not the best use of Capital One miles. I won’t get into why as that is a Pandora’s box that you likely did not come here to read about.

But wait! There’s more. Bet you thought you were done reading didn’t you! So for every segment of this trip that had a business or domestic first class cabin, we ended up booking it. (Note: Allegiant does not offer domestic first class and the small regional AA CRJ from Charlotte to Huntington does not have a domestic first class option either.) That is except for that final LAX to CLT segment. I challenged myself at the beginning of this trip to see if I could book an around the world trip in business/first class for 3 people without busting the bank, and that one missing flight caused my brain to itch a little.

American does sometime offer upgrades in the app, but they can be really pricey and not worth it.

This next part gets a little complex, but try and follow along.

So my American Express Business Platinum card offers a $200 dollar airline credit for a single airline of your choosing to cover incidental fees such as bag fees, food, seat selection, etc. It just so happens I had chosen American when I made the initial selection this year and I had not used any of the credit yet this year. This $200 dollar travel credit unfortunately does not apply to upgrades, but does apply to seat selection fees. When you upgrade to first class any seat selection fee is refunded back to you. We had originally not selected a seat as we just aren’t picky about seats as we are very short, but I decided to go ahead and book the bulkhead seats which were $89 dollars a piece which for 3 people was enough to use up all $200 of my credit.

This will trigger Amex to give me the $200 dollar credit. I then upgraded our 3 seats for a total of $726. The seat selection fee is refunded, but I still keep the $200 that was credited to my account, effectively making the upgrade $526 dollars for a nearly 5 hour flight. This isn’t everything though. I also get 2x miles per dollar spent on American Airlines on my American Airlines Business card and American recently started offering 5x miles per dollar spent on an upgrade. So I basically get 7x miles if I buy an upgrade, and as such a $726 dollar purchase earns me a total of 5,082 more American Miles. I already mentioned how 6,000 miles is the cheapest redemption American offers. So by booking the 1st class upgrade, I had now earned nearly enough miles to book another one way flight to anywhere in the US.

I know that got real confusing real fast, but to summarize, we paid $526 dollars to upgrade plus the initial 18,000 in miles and $33 dollars in taxes for a total of $559 or $187 dollars per person for seats that cost $2367 total or $789 per person.

That is a savings of $1,806 total or $602 per person and as lagniappe we earned nearly enough miles for another one way ticket on American Airlines. Not bad.

And as such, that ends our journey around the world and my flight planning. I could now rest. We’ll see how it goes. The mantra for us when we travel is “Man Plan, God Laughs.” Let’s see how hard God laughs this time…

It is nearly impossible to do a live blog given the break neck pace of this trip, and as such there will be none. As time goes on, a day by day blog of our travels will be posted as I find time to write it so stay tuned for that. There will also be a number of summary articles in terms of total cost, a more detailed description of the use of points and miles for those miles enthusiasts out there, and other logistics oriented articles as well. If there is something specifically you want me to write about, please let me know via email, messenger, comments, etc. Stay tuned and follow along! Thanks for reading!

To Infinity and Beyond!

See how the planning turned out here on the semi-live blog!

You can read about the planning from the beginning here.

Read about the inception of the trip here.