Now that our long-planned trip to Kenya is in the rear-view mirror, I turned my attention to 2023 trip planning. I already mentioned we have a trip to Liverpool in April. We’re flying Singapore Airlines A350 Business Class from Houston to Manchester and flying back from London to New York in Virgin Atlantic A350 Business Class. We have a couple of cheap positioning flights to Houston and from New York on Delta.

I booked a few other flights this week. We’ve decided to visit Manhattan for a three day weekend at the end of the month. I decided to book us in and out of JFK so we could try the new train service from JFK to Grand Central. We’ll stay at the Andaz 5th Avenue using Hyatt points as it’s nearby Grand Central Station and my wife’s favorite art supply warehouse store. Our youngest will take the train up from New Jersey to spend a day with us as well.

As I previously wrote about, I booked us an epic 2-week trip to Southeast Asia in June. We decided to cancel that trip as it was just too much time off work this year between the safari, Liverpool trip and our rescheduled trip to Ireland in October (more about that in an upcoming post). Hopefully, I can reschedule for next year. Luckily for me, there was a schedule change with ANA that allowed me to cancel without penalty (except that I now have 210k miles stuck with ANA).

Instead of that trip, I found four nights available at the Grand Hyatt Kauai in August so I grabbed those using Hyatt points. I also booked us on Delta using mostly leftover ecredits and applied Regional Upgrade Certificates. Our itinerary is ATL-SEA-LIH and LIH-LAX-ATL. So far, two of the flights have cleared and I’m hopeful that they all will clear before August.

We’ve also got a trip to DC in July where our younger daughter will be interning this summer. I used my Delta Reserve companion ticket so it was 2 for 1 on the flights. We’ll also stay at the Park Hyatt again and hopefully use a suite upgrade award as we did last summer.

We know there are also trips to Baltimore in May, Marco Island in November and (hopefully) South America next January that remain to be planned once we get everyone’s schedule firmed up. I look forward to sharing all these trips with you on the blog.

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