The new Admiral's Club Seattle.
This is for the frequent flyers out there.... skip if you don't care about FEBO, customer service or ticket vouchers
Arrived at airport two hours ahead of time. Good thing as well. TH's ticket was not really a ticket anymore, but a transportation voucher. WTF? She had a seat, but somewhere in July, they decided to key something incorrectly when we requested an upgrade and comments in the record showed that she received a voucher for her ticket price that we never requested or we never received. There were comments that had been deleted and the record was really long. It took the nimble agent 50 minutes to get a ticket from the voucher and an act of god from the EXP desk. I felt sorry for those behind us. However, it was done and since there is no club anymore, we spent the time at the marketplace sipping bittersweet mochas from Dilletante and amazed at the breadth of fried foods available at 10:30 am.
Flight was typically WB full, ate sandwich, did a bunch of sudokus, listened to Ipod, declined terrible food (wrap thing) and landed on time. New terminal is a long walk from our arrival gate, took 20 minutes. Decent new club, weak camparis, nice bathrooms, the new terminal is connected to the new Grand Hyatt, which hopefully, I will never have to experience.
There was an immense line at the gate due to the new DHS INS checkin/check out procedure, slowing down everything, but since we had a mechanical, we didn't board for another hour. I hate that.
Plane was fine, we were in 2ab which was picked by TH. I don't like these seats for a bunch of reasons. One, the screen shines in your face all night long which is stupid since business class gets dvd players and typically no one watches the movie. What can I say about the food? I ordered risotto with prawns and scallops and got eggplant ravioli, which I didn't want since if I wanted it I would have enunciated the words eggplant and ravioli instead of prawn and risotto and there were no more risottos when I pointed out this error. I was offered lamb (not) or beef (not) and was not pleased when this occured because it is rocket science to write down the order correctly? I'm soo glad that I had a few carrot sticks and celery in the club preflight and that TH had offered me her sad looking rubber prawn from her hors d'ouvres. In any case, I survived to breakfast, so life does not revolve around your choice of entrees and that you will survive if you don't get food for six hours.
Flight was okay, landed one hour late. No line at immigration, managed to hop on gatwick express and onto 82 bus to Churchill Hyatt. Hotel checkin was irritating as first they tried to put us in a two bedded room and then he said he found a king, but it was on the smoking club floor. I held my ground (not usual for me) and managed to get a nonsmoking king on club floor. Room was fine with view of the Radisson accross the way. The hotel was chock a block full from UAE/US trade talks, but this hotel is always full, so I didn't buy his excuse for not being able to find me a room based on my preferences. I stay at this hotel four or five times a year, sometimes paid, sometimes on points.
Next post for the actual London trip info.
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