• Intro: Visiting the Christkindlemarkets of Mainz
• Review: Hyatt Regency Mainz
• Wandering Mainz, including the Christkindlemarkets
• Review: Lufthansa First Class Terminal and Lounge (yes, both!)
• Review: Lufthansa First Class 747-8 – Frankfurt to Washington Dulles
• Conclusion: Visiting the Christkindlemarkets of Mainz

I wrote in the early life of this blog, about Maslows Hierarchy of needs with respect to miles and points. In that post, I said the higher level was when you could share the best of “The Hobby” with family and friends.

This quick trip to Germany wasn’t the first such trip (the first was a round the world to China), but it was the first chance for me to bring both my brother –who had been to a Christmas market in Switzerland– and my father –his first time– to Mainz, purely to enjoy some gluhwein, chat, and bond.

Of course getting there is always the hardest part. I was able to fly us all on American Airlines 777-300ER in business, of course we had to connect in Dallas, and London, which made for a longer travel time than I would have preferred – map below:

I figure that everyone’s seen so much domestic American Airlines First Class, and a ton of American Airlines Business Class on the 777-300ER, so I thought I’d share a brief review in photos below:

We visited the British Airways Business Class Lounge in Heathrow, here are a few photos of that:

I decided I needed to skip any photos of flying British Airways London Heathrow to Frankfurt, for a very selfish reason, my own good..

After an epic trip, we finally made it to the Hyatt Regency Mainz – that’s a post from last year, but I’ll be sure to update with this year, because my stay was amazing. To summarize, we stayed on the top floor of one of my favorite Hyatt Regencies in the world, and while it was unfortunate that my brother had to stay in Europe for work, my father and I flew Lufthansa First Class home, and even had some time to sample the First Class Terminal and First Class Lounge.

Making it all happen.

Getting 3 award seats on American is seldom easy. So, I went looking for the best bookable experience. BA was out, I didn’t want anyone to pay steep fuel surcharges. I wanted to avoid JFK if I could, since this was a quick trip. Ultimately I settled on DFW, which made for a long travel day with connections on both ends, but also offered a long enough flight from DFW to LHR for the 3 of us to get some good sleep. In total, the flight out cost a whole 150,000 miles (and an amount of greenbacks I won’t state since this was flying family that read my blog) for the three of us. In my opinion, that was quite the deal.

The hotel, I think I paid 6,000 Hyatt Gold Passport points per night for two rooms (so 24,000 points total). They folks at the Hyatt Mainz were kind enough to provide lounge access, and even put my brother in my former room for a night, after my father and I checked out (for better or worse, I made my father and brother share a room for two nights, and took the king room for myself).

Flying home for my father and I cost 110,000 United Miles per person, which was well worth it for Lufthansa First Class.

More to Come

I’ll cover the Christkindlemarkets in a further post, as well as the Lufthansa First Class Terminal and Lounge, and finally, Flying Lufthansa First Class. So stick around, won’t you?