American gave them. My wife used to travel for business, (In fact, we only saw each onther on the weekends for our first year and a half) and she had more miles on AA than should have been allowed by law. One perk was every third flight she would get a free upgrade.
Anyhow, for our honeymoon, we used her accumulated miles to fly from Raleigh to Sydney (Australia, not Nova Scotia) business class. This meant First Class for the US segments. I love first class. Mmmm… Warm mixed nuts. I wanna be rich so I can afford first class again.
The other bonus for flying first (or Business) class over seas is free admission to the Admirals’ Club. Thats right, no waiting in the terminal with the rest of the RAMs, you get your own table, free drinks, and a nice lady comes and fetches you when your flight is about to board.
Yup, we got lots of hot moist towels. (Not all at once. Every few hours or so.) I really liked them; they made my skin feel better hydrated and not so tight and dry by the time we got out of the recycled, dry airplane air.
A funny thing happened on our way to Spokane
I once left one of our free tickets on the table at home when we were traveling Detroit to Spokane ( via Minnepolis). We had an 8am flight and had been up since 4am to get to the airport by seven.
Rather than drive the drive back home ( 1.5 hours in crappy traffic each way) and get a much later flight at 4pm which would put us into Spokane at about 8pm-ish and we still had to drive two hours. I bought Mr. Ujest’s ticket at the counter at full Y fare. It was like $1200 and came with an automatic upgrade to First class round trip.
You could send in your ticket that was lost to the Airlines to get refunded the amount on the ticket - $1200 - less a $75 fee for being a bone head. Knowing this then saved us alot of hassle.
He got to ride in first class all the way there and back. I had a nice quiet flight. And the bonus was that he was credited for the frequent flyer miles to his account for flying first class even though he shouldn’t have been. Yay for human/computer error!
Incidently, Jurph if you travel with kids or someone who is handicapped ( wheelchair/crutches/old people) you get to board the plane first and get first dibs on the overhead bins to claim them like a pirate. Traveling with my FIL in a wheelchair gives us excellent service and by the time we get off the plane ( we wait until everyone is off, which is usually ten minutes tops) our luggage is already offloaded and by itself on the carosel.
Glad you enjoyed yourself in the Thurston Howell Section.
I rode first class in the bullet train from Tokyo to Kyoto and had a similar experience. There were 3 seats on either side of the aisle in the other cars, only 2 per side in first class. They were the first seats on anything in Japan that I actually fit comfortably in (apparently my Canadian butt is larger than the average Japanese one).
No free drinks or food though, but I did get a hot towel. There was a lunch cart brought buy with (un)reasonably priced food and drinks. I bought a $5 Coke. They let you bring your own food aboard though, so I was already well provisioned for the trip.
We rode back to Tokyo on just regular class seating, which was fine, I leaned up against the window and slept.