Tickets, please!

Up until now we've not done anything massively undo-able... we've sold the house, everything has gone into a container that's not left yet, we've not actually handed in our notice at work, my passport now has a vista stapled to it, etc, etc.

But now we've actually booked our flights!  Granted, you could argue that again that's not an undo-able thing as of course we could just not turn up at the airport at the right time but that's not the point...

Getting the flights booked was a real pain, though.  I've come to the conclusion that airlines don't really want you to be able to redeem your airmiles without jumping through a load of hoops and that's probably true - they are in the business of making money, after all.

My belief is that a given journey should be worth X miles, you have Y miles, you go ahead and book your flight and then you can do some pro-rata thing where you get a discount based on Y divided X, but of course it's not that simple.  You need to have at least a certain % of the miles to even be considered for any kind of discount, the discount appears to be one some kind of exponential scale, you can't add any children, etc, etc.  To make use of the miles that Sarah and I have already we'd have had to make two separate single-seat bookings for just the final leg (Singapore to Sydney), try and make sure they were sat together, and THEN phone up their hotline to get Finn and Isla added on.  Then we'd have to book ANOTHER flight from Heathrow to Singapore for all of us, and because we're effectively making four separate flight bookings the overall cost is actually more than a simple 'all of us flying from Heathrow to Sydney, via Singapore, full fat price' - ridiculous :-(

So we're going to accrue even more miles by the end of the trip which we won't be able to use because Singapore Airlines don't fly internally in Australia and they don't have any Australian airline partners.  Sarah's suggestion is we can use them up flying back to Singapore to meet our first lot of visitors "really cheaply" (she says) but to me that's like 'buy one, get one free' of something you didn't want in the first place... but that's just me, tight.

Andy