A Unicorn Starlux Award, Southwest Is Building Lounges & the Duct-Taped Passenger

Shawn Coomer (0:00)

AA is making changes to their dining. A guy got taped up on a plane. And I booked Starlux, Mark. I found a Starlux Saver Award on Alaska. All that coming up right now on MTM Travel.

Mark Ostermann (0:12)

Avoiding the angled lie flat. That's good, right?

Shawn Coomer (0:21)

So happy Monday, everyone. Certainly a happy Monday for me, Mark. This weekend, I was on seats.arrow searching. So I have a word alert set up on seats.arrow, I did not have Taipei set up, but I've been searching it a little bit. And LAX to Taipei, it popped up. I did like a range of dates and one date popped up at 75K. And I was like, this can't be right. It can't be. I have not seen Starlux on that route in a while.

I just missed it, but it doesn't seem like there's a ton of space. And there it is, a single seat, 75K. And I happened to have a lot of Alaska miles and it was just beautiful. It was a couple of days before I wanted to go though. So I guess I'm extending my trip.

Mark Ostermann (0:59)

No, I think I know our buddy Rick loves Starlux and really enjoys that flight. He mainly flies out of Seattle. I think that might be better availability, or maybe it's always last minute. I haven't talked to him about it in a little bit, but it does seem like last minute with that, that airline pops up a little bit better on Alaska.

So yeah, you got all those from when you transferred membership rewards over to Hawaii right before it went away.

Shawn Coomer (1:25)

Yeah. So it's actually the program that was probably the most perfect for me to use, not that I don't have the ability to use other ones. So it just all aligned in. A couple of things about Taipei I could say, they have a free stopover tour for anybody who's ever connecting through Taipei, officially through the government where you can do a half day tour for free, which I did several years ago. It's a lot of fun. So I'm not sure if I'm going to fly. I couldn't get the connection to work on that pricing.

I can get another Starlux flight to Hong Kong or to Macau later in the day, or I could stay in Taipei. So I haven't decided what I'm going to do. I've been to Taipei a couple of times. So I don't know. But I did fly Starlux a few years ago, back when we got them, when they first announced, or when they first released it at 50K, and my whole family flew it. What's funny is something about Taiwan, but I would say EVA and Starlux, those are the two business class products that I've flown that felt like they were sort of on the border of first class.

Mark Ostermann (2:19)

Yeah, I've heard good things about EVA, but it's nice to hear you put them at the same level. I know a lot of people love EVA.

Also, Starlux has become more popular, and that's a route that I was thinking about searching on the way home, but that adds for our Japan trip, but that adds more connections, more hoops, all those things. I don't know if I'll do it or not, but if I struggle to find a decent flight, I think once low-cost carriers come in, I'll be able to find that flight from Japan to Seoul a little bit easier, at least more affordable. But if not, that's a pivot point that I might have to go to. My son's okay. Japan's number one. Everything else, he's kind of open negotiation. Seoul is definitely his number two, but he's like, hey, whatever you need to do to get home is cool with me.

Shawn Coomer (3:08)

Yeah, I love that airport. I mean, they have the Hello Kitty gates, which is really cool.

I don't know. It's weird how the airline culture developed there because you feel like Taiwan is not all that big, yet they have three really crazy airlines, really good airlines, EVA, China Airlines, and Starlux. They're all very good products and very well reviewed and stuff like that. So I don't know. I was just super excited. I couldn't believe it. It was one of those moments where it popped up. Because I have been searching it this week. I didn't have the alert set up. That was the only thing. So that's why I manually found it. But I had been searching this enough that there was no space. And then it was just one of those things where I've been finding so much phantom availability on JAL, on AA's website. Pretty much, I mean, first class seeds. Which I think JAL released a bunch of stuff this morning that I missed for next year, which I could have actually used in the end of May. And I didn't see the alert for it. But anyway, I've had so many times where I thought I found something with JAL and I booked through AA and it's not there. And so I was just like waiting for it to fail and it did it. And then I went to like search. I don't know if anybody out there does that, but I'm nerdy. I'll be like, what's the best seat on the plane?