Trip Preview: Europe the Not-So-Direct Way

With the series about my trip to catch the Brussels Airlines Sukhoi Superjet before its retirement finished, it’s time to start posting articles about one last trip of 2018.

While the Sukhoi Superjet trip was a side trip that I did during my visit to Europe, in this series, I will focus on the flights to and from Europe. As such, some articles from this series will be about flights and lounge visits that took place before that side trip.

Brussels Airlines Sukhoi Superjet Operated by CityJet

Between posting reviews in this series, I will also continue posting articles from Hirofumi’s trip during which he had a chance to try four different Singapore Airlines business class seats.

Copenhagen – Singapore in Business Class for Under $800

I started building the itinerary for this trip when LOT Polish Airlines offered an excellent business class fare from Copenhagen to Singapore via Warsaw for a brief period of time.

While not many people seemed to have taken advantage of the deal (certainly nowhere near as many as have taken advantage of the New Year Cathay Pacific first class fare), I decided to book myself a roundtrip for about 800 dollars as I hadn’t flown with LOT before and this was a great chance to review their business class on both short and long haul flights.

LOT Polish Airlines Boeing 787-8 Business Class

For this trip, I used the outbound portion of the ticket, Copenhagen – Warsaw – Singapore, as part of my return from Europe to Japan. I will do a separate trip to Europe later in the year when I’ll use the return portion.

Besides giving me a chance to try LOT’s EMB-195 and 787-8, this part of the itinerary also allowed me to visit the airline’s two lounges in Warsaw, as well as the Scandinavian Airlines Business Class Lounge in Copenhagen.

A One-Way Aeroflot Ticket

Next, I bought a one-way Aeroflot ticket from Tokyo to Vienna via Moscow Sheremetyevo since I haven’t reviewed Aeroflot on this site yet, and also because my girlfriend was flying on the same flights (though she had a return ticket and only stayed in Europe for a couple of days).

Aeroflot Airbus A330-300

If you follow this blog, you might have noticed that I already wrote an article about this portion of the trip, talking about the not-so-pleasant transfer experience we had at Sheremetyevo airport.

The flights themselves were perfectly fine, though, as you will see in my reviews of both Aeroflot’s A330-300 on the flight from Tokyo to Moscow, and 737-800 on the shorter flight from Moscow to Vienna.

Since our flight arrived in Vienna late at night, we decided to stay at the NH Hotel Vienna Airport – a hotel that I’d seen countless times when traveling through the airport but that I never had a chance to stay at until this trip.

NH Hotel Vienna

Adding Some More Airlines to the Mix

The above left me with the following itinerary:

  • Tokyo – Moscow – Vienna
  • Copenhagen – Warsaw – Singapore

As such, I still had to figure out a way to get from Vienna or Budapest to Copenhagen, and from Singapore to Japan.

The first part, I solved very simply – by booking an Austrian Airlines return flight from Vienna to Copenhagen and back.

While I only had about two and a half hours to transfer in Copenhagen, the flight from Vienna was on time and I was able to check my bags through even though I was connecting on separate tickets, so I had no problem catching the LOT flight.

Given that I already reviewed Austrian Airlines’ flights from Vienna to Paris and from Basel to Vienna, I won’t be reviewing the short hop to Copenhagen.

What I will be reviewing, though, will be the flights I took from Singapore to Japan.

I searched for the “right” ones for quite some time, and in the end, I settled with a Delta business class award ticket from Singapore to Osaka via Bali.

Garuda Airlines A330

Besides allowing me to review Garuda Indonesia’s business class for the first time, I was also able to book KLM’s fifth freedom flight from Singapore to Bali and try the Dutch airline’s business class for the first time as well.

Finally, for the short hop from Osaka to Tokyo, I was planning to use Avios miles. However, as it seems like Avios doesn’t allow last minute redemptions on JAL anymore, I had to buy a ticket instead.

I opted for a StarFlyer flight that had the best timing. While StarFlyer is my favorite airline to fly domestically in Japan, I won’t be reviewing the flight as I reviewed the same flight before. You can see the review here.

StarFlyer Airbus A320

Stay Tuned!

With more than 15 articles, this is going to be a fairly long series, and so it will take a while until all parts are out. However, I will start with the first article about the trip – a review of the Aeroflot flight to Moscow – next week.

So, stay tuned!

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