wandering amphibia

So to give a bit of background, this is how I structured our London trip.

First of all, I used Avios to book us tickets from Bologna to London. No availability was happening on www.ba.com, but I found an interesting trick for Avios.com where non-UK residents are still able to book tickets – and the lower flat-fee taxes do, indeed, apply. Also, availability is wide open as it appears that Avios.com actually purchases tickets from BA – hence why there is Y/9 on most flights.

Arriving to London, we are going to switch hotels every day. There are a few reasons for this – one is that I want to try different prpperties, two is that it has to do with free nights (of course), and so on.

So day 1… Days Inn Hyde Park. 25,000 Wyndham Rewards points that I got through the “Revere” promo fiasco (the one where you would book a hotel in Florida, not show up, and pocket the points for a net outlay of 50 bucks). So my actual cost for this Days Inn was about $75 – not too bad, considering the rack rate for the room is £350.

The room was insultingly small. So small, in fact, that opening one suitcase meant not being able to open any others. It was so small that you could not even manoeuvre with the suitcase open. And this was the largest room they offered – the “family” room with 3 beds.

But we did not care. After spending an hour stuck in Heathrow because first, the plane could not pass another plane that was stuck in a passage because the tug that was pushing it broke down, and second, unable to get out of the plane because the jetty could not go low enough, and when they pushed it lower, the hydraulics broke and we had to walk down a set of stairs – which they had trouble locating. So when we got to the Days Inn at 10pm, we more or less switched off and went to sleep. Therefore, I do not even consider this a day 1 post – Days Inn was day 0, for all practical purposes.

Watch this post for an update soon on how the next hotel went!