Honeymoon in Hawaii, Day seven

We will remember dinner at SanSei for a while. Good atmosphere, food, and service. Here's what one of our Sushi dishes looked like.

On our last whole day left in Hawaii, we planned to rent a car and take it up to Diamond Head and parasail. Seemed like a good plan, problem was Waikiki had very few available cars, and I didn't want to spend $150 to rent a Crossfire for a half day.

Based on our experiences the past couple days, Waikiki is just a bit too busy for us. Going from the resort lifestyle to Waikiki required too much adjusting. I'm sure we'll consider spending time on another island next time, either Maui or maybe Hawaii, the big island.

We ended up coming back to the Outrigger, which by the way was quite disappointing last night in terms of noise level. The paper thin walls and poorly designed plumbing from adjacent rooms kills any chance of getting quality rest at night. Our plan: to get on the sail boat tour, or take surf lessons. Guess what, surf lessons were sold out and the sail boat we planned to tour on was reserved for a private party until much later in the day. Things weren't going our way, but we weren't going to let it get us down so we rented a couple inflatable rafts (for about $10, nothing is cheap) and drifted on the ocean for a couple hours. That ended up being quite relaxing for both of us.

After dinner with family, we're now packing up for a 8:45 departure from the hotel tomorrow morning. It's quite sad, yes, but we had a great time.

United Airlines and Orion

As you might have noticed, I recently went on my Honeymoon. We decided to take our chances upgrading to 1st class with frequent flyer miles and not purchase the upgrade up-front, to save some cash. Fortunately we had enough points (30k), which we recieved for some travel earlier in the year as well as a gift. We applied the miles to our itinerary about three weeks prior to the big day.

So, I expected that if seats were available (and that I knew I could check that much in today's Internet age) we would land them. Wrong. Miles upgrades are treated very differently than cash, and we got waitlisted. Waitlisted until we got to the terminal and then if was clear that we were in a game. About twenty minutes into our wait (at the terminal), it became clear there was a lot of seat shuffling, and the counter attendant actually offered $400 for people to move off of our flight. It was clear they had overbooked, and fortunately for us, quite motivated to free two seats in 1st class so fill ours. They did, which was a great thing and I'm very thankful.

But that got me thinking. What happened, and what an interesting business this is. I know the airlines have been deregulated since the 1970's, but I'm really surprised the level of sophistication that surrounds the sale of seats, at it just smells funny. Turns out, Orion is the system making these decisions (in my case, as I flew United Airlines) and I really don't have any person to blame for the confusion (or frustration in the case of my waitlisted-1st class seats). Orion is the system measures demand and compares competitors rates, as well as performs all of the time factoring.

Take for example the last minute bookers. The airlines like these folks because they usually pay a premium for booking late and if kept happy can be loyal customers. So the airlines keep a bucket of seats available just for them. Sounds smart, and it probably is, but it was this that kept me wondering if we'd make our upgrade. Read more about it here: http://www.slate.com/id/2154261/

Thanks Orion.