- Weekend in Taipei: Introduction
- Review: Eva Air 777-300ER Houston to Taipei
- Review: Grand Hyatt Taipei
- Weekend in Taipei: Touring Taipei
- Weekend in Taipei: Taipei’s Taoyuan International Airport
- Review: Cathay Pacific Taipei to Hong Kong
- Review: Cathay Pacific Hong Kong to Chicago
- Weekend in Taipei: Conclusion
To set the stage, I was yearning to get on a plane. It was the end of October, and I hadn’t been on a true long haul flight since the end of July. The end of July! I was getting stircrazy. Searching the British Airways Search tool, Searching United.com, Searching ExpertFlyer, searching for flights someplace that we could do a reasonable visit of in no more than 2 days off of work.
I was originally looking to go to Cambodia, but the flights just didn’t want to line up. I also really, really wanted to fly EVA Air. So, rather than make things complicated—as I am known to do—I decided to go the simple path. EVA Air is one of Taiwan’s more widely known airlines, they are a Star Alliance member, which meant I could redeem some Ultimate Rewards points via United, or Membership Rewards points via Aeroplan, or nearly any transferrable currency via Singapore KrisFlyer.
My next concern was where to stay. Despite the World of Hyatt news, this frequent leisure traveler is determined to requalify Diamond and become a Globalist—I think I’m going to put that on my business card. So, my next concern was that the Grand Hyatt Taipei was rumored to be haunted. How appropriate that we were staying there over Halloween weekend!
A quick turn to the Oracle of Twitter allayed my concerns.
Next, I needed to get home. A week earlier, my wife had jumped at the chance to fly Cathay Pacific First Class, we had done that last year and very much enjoyed it. Alas, that space was phantom, but, I ended up finding space in the 4 days between when we booked Business Class, and left. I only found 1 seat though, and ExpertFlyer was showing F2 (and went down to F1, meaning Cathay Pacific was only selling 1 seat in First Class). I put my wife up in First and accepted my likely fate in Business Class.
Alas, the day before we were due to leave, I took to twitter on my T-Mobile Apple iPhone 6, and low and behold, the American Air team was awesome, just proving that if you don’t ask, you don’t know.
Overall, the trip was a great weekend, if only 50 hours on the ground in Taipei, it was well worth the miles, and proved to be a very memorable trip.
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