After recovering from some cold – don’t stay in the cold outside even if over the day you where too hot as the aircondition and the weather will kill you *grrrrrr* – I went to the delicious birthday bash at Yahoo. As most options travelling there where not really compelling I engaged in my first adventure of getting a rental car ever.

It wasn’t as bad as expected – after all I was a bit concerned about this automatic gear. I still prefer stick, but I can deal with the other one now.

Fox Rental around my hotel was okay but lacked customer service, which is why I took the free miles option to drive a bit around the hotel in south San Francisco – to find a Hertz Station. Which turned out to be wonderfully nice in service. If you ever need to rent there – head for the South San Fran Hertz station at south boulevard.

I still have not manage to find a normal supermarket, but had another reason to rent again today (and over the weekend): Ikea.

When passing Palo Alto on my way to Yahoo I saw familar coloring of yellow and blue. And when I asked Maryam Scoble about meeting she suggested Palo Alot (which I love). To which I added “Great! I can make a visit to Ikea first”.

And the magic words came: “I want to go too!”. Other visit wineries, I have more fun at Ikea. So Maryam and I are hooking up for a truly girly experience: Visiting Ikea with nothing special in mind to shop. :) :)

Foreign woman with a high degree of talent of not finding the way on the street tonight.

Now I need to get to the printer downstairs to print out all those direction maps ;)

Well, at least that is working as planned, the geek dinner is happening – now wish me luck I can take my Laptop on Board. Hm. I should consider getting a drive to the airport by a friend just in case to give him my laptop if … but I digress.

The plan:
Flying to London on Friday morning (urgs), Geekdinner in the evening before, then Barcamp and back on monday evening. And the idiot I am: I should have flown back on tuesday to have monday to go watch Avenue Q! :(

Looking forward to the weekend, seeing some familiar faces and a lot of new ones! And in case why the hell I am going to Barcamp London instead of Barcamp Berlin well … I will be in the States for the Portable Media Expo at that exact time. :( :(

Geekdinner Friday Evening Sep 1st (places available)
Barcamp Sep 2-3 (sorry, forget it, no place)

Technorati Tags: barcamp, barcamp london, geek dinner, london

If your first though is “sweet tier points!” then you know your BA tricks. Having read a posting of somebody today in the BA forum on flyertalk I was very happy to find out that my first thought indeed was Sinatra and not that of a good British Airways tier point run!

[Flights between Bahrein and Dohba are considered good tier point runs. Other than most airlines, BA has a so called tier point system versus a miles system. You need if you live in continental Europe 400 TP for Silver status (oneworld saphire, like AA platin) or then another 800 points for Gold (oneworld emerald, like AA EXP Platin). Bah-Doh is kind of inexpensive in first class, a very short flight and brings 180 TP each leg. You can fly there on cheap 80K American Airlines award miles from Europe, but that is a story for another time]

Technorati Tags: sinatra, ba, british airways, tier points, tier point run

And some consider upper deck to be even better than first class. So Nicole, business must be going great if you can fly business class and sip nicely champange in the lounge and blog from there?

Well, kind of. ;) I did intent to fly Word Traveller Plus on BA which has two major charming attributes: You can (if available) upgrade for 25000 miles to Biz (and othere than some American Airlines Biz means something nice on BA), and they have bigger seats.

I don’t really care about the food, champagne or wine or anything, but I do care about the seats. Did I mention that BA Biz has true flat bads? Now, how did I get this one?

I was early at the airport, looking at the dreadful long line for economy checkin and waited 40 minutes for being checked in. Looking longingly to the Club world counter from which I can check in next time, because after these mere two flights I am silver status on BA. :)

So when she finished my checkin, the nice lady told me that ” Vincent is going to meet me” hmmm. And Vincent was so nice to give me a shiny new ticket with the famous 64B on it. And I don’t even need to check in with ‘the plebs’. I love upgrades. ;))

Technorati Tags: BA, business class, upgrade

(Okay, to be precice: Tim got me interested in another meethingie Tuesday evening so this was a great ‘excuse’ to go back to the Cardinal Hotel and the Coupa Cafe. ;))

Which was also true in San Francisco where I was at Podshow – no, not what you think. ;) I was there to meet Andrew Grumet (had a nice coffee with him, have to do that again!) and through him Michael Butler reminded me that there was a monthly SFO Podcaster meetup near my hotel – perfect. Again: Meeting old friends and new faces was awesome.

After blogher I will be heading back to SFO and thursday I will be flying back to Germany. Plans? Perhaps do some Segway Tourist tour, probably visit the musical A Chorus Line and for the rest enjoy SFO ;))

And the Moma? I found again I hate modern ‘art’. (I will make some fotoseries of empty starbucks frappuchino bottlecaps and call it art also.) I think the Explanatorium, de Young and Golden Gate Park will be much nicer.

I am trying between getting the best out of everything as well as keeping my privacy – which is a struggle if you are dealing with American companies! But back to the fun. One of the post I just read made me laugh so hard, that I would like to share it with you. The poster of one thread asked how to keep his children’s milage accounts active as they are about to get zeroed. And the favorite answer?

If you’re male and have multiple children, there’s probably at least one woman in your life. Sending flowers once per kid per three years would not be overdoing it.

If you’re female and their father doesn’t send you flowers, send them to yourself. (Maybe he’ll take the hint.) If you’re female and he does, ask him to do it this way once in a while.

Afair there is a promo for sending out flowers and getting miles for that too ;))

Technorati Tags: frequent flyer program, flyertalk

I just saw a beautiful shot of the Golden Gate Bridge on Peter Kaminski’s photos – great new desktop background for me to get excited about my trip!

Well, it definitely should be exciting, because I just spend some serious money on three trips flying to the US – and that is just the flying … Spent an hour on the hotline for making my payment and rechecking everything about my flight tickets and it seems, as if my first agent I phoned to really was a crack at what he was doing.

I have tried three different phone agents from British Airways since then and all of them said “huh? That is not supposed to be possible??”. So I just told them just to leave my reservations as they where. And I continue to be impressed with their booking system – one minute after he submitted my booking, I was able to check and see it online. :)) I paid again about 7 Euros for the call of that hour, but they are so much better at the phone than me trying to get things done on the website. Yes, it does cost another 35 Euro per ticket to get them through the phone, but it is worth it.

[During the interview I had an additional moment of panicking … I did book my upcoming trip and two each at the end of june and july, when suddenly i was hit by lightening “FRAK – was reboot conference at the beginning of june or july? If this is july, then you just screwed up big big time!” Luckily I talked to Thomas later that evening for an interview for the DLD and he said “June” – puuuuh! :))}

Tag(s): british airways, reboot, booking by phone

• I think I have settled for bookings with British Airways now – those World Traveller Plus seats look too good compared to others.
• I think (I hope) I understood their milage promotional system.
• Too bad I don’t have an Amex or a credit card from them, because I will have to book all three flights to the US in one row – flights over there otherwise are full. Having this amount of money in miles would have been nice, especially as the card from BA has a better rate.
• Everybody says ‘get an Amex Starwood’ – yeah great, but we don’t have that over here …
• I would like to participate in all those great offerings and bonuses from BA – but they only do their tricks in the UK, eligable for UK people :((
• For this reason, I should stay with Lufthansa who have interesting miles and & things
• I hate it, that most of the websites out there only have content for the US, in English, for the UK – but not for me.
• flyertalk.com is a great forum for all kinds of threads. The BA forum is a bit UK centric, but perhaps if I ask nicely, they will try to give more comments about things happening on the continent
• Kayak is another interesting tool for checking out fares as well as airlines – the don’t have all airlines, but a lot of them, and they make good use of remembering searches, Ajax and Google maps. Especially check out the buzz feature to get good price comparisons to different parts of the world from your home airport

And last but not least I would like to give out a praise for the British Airways call center. While it is costly to book something there (35 Euro per Ticket and 12 ct per minute calling) there is no way in hell you will ever match their experience in making a booking.

I did have a great first contact with which I planned all three trips (LHR-SFO-LAX-LHR, to SEA for Gnomedex (?), to blogher) and that guy was creative and working good with me. I consider this money to be well spent, because we managed prices I did not get anywhere else, or where even able to book with BA and I already have cool seats reserved. And as a bonus for the website: I was able to have a full interinary on my reserved flight status with every kind of information you can think about.

Pleasent surprise with the Executive Club hotline as well – the women not only took my enrollment, but secretly entered me into an award which is running at the moment for oneworld customers – make two legs by two oneworld partners and get 12k miles for free. I know this, because I was in horror when the BA site told me “you can’t enter, you are already subscribed” – because from my point of view I only subscribed in AAdvantage for that, not on BA (and you now how such systems mix up by Murphy’s law). When I tried to clarify this situation, I by chance had the same women today on the fon and she told me, that she saw my trip and entered me for the contest “so it would be a surprise for me later”. Cool.

So I will try to get that clever guy again tomorow to look at the bookings again. :) Btw: I only had males on the reservation line (abstract thinking, fast combination) and females on the executive club line (nice service, pleasing the typical male cutstomer?).

If I ever get a female on the reservation line, I will hang up and try to get a man – not for the cleverness, but perhaps he adds some magical code like “has sexy voice. Upgrade her, so she flies with us more often and calls here because she will always have complicated flights!” in order for me to perhaps snatch an upgrade on my trip. ;)))

Tag(s): travel, british airways, customer service, customer satisfaction