Trip Intro: Chasing Winter Sun In The Middle East

A few weeks ago, I decided to redeem some miles I had for some award flights in business class to go to the Middle East during wintertime in The Netherlands. It’s been a while that I made an award flight in business class. Although I traveled a lot the post few year, my last big trip on award flights was around the world on frequent flyer miles about 6 years ago. Therefore it was time to luxury travel again. In this article, I explain briefly what to expect from this trip.

Trip overview

During this 10-day trip, I will actually visit 4 countries in total. Since my first award flight started at Paris Charles de Gaulle Airport, I had to take a TGV-train from The Netherlands the day before. This was because my flight from there was leaving early in the morning.

Although there are direct flights with Oman Air from Muscat to Amsterdam, I couldn’t find award space on this route on my desired date of travel. Therefore, I had to book an award flight back to Frankfurt.

Award flights

For this trip I redeemed some of my Flying Blue miles which I earned using my Flying Blue American Express Platinum card. I made two award redemptions:

44,000 Flying Blue miles for my flight with Etihad Airways in business class on the A380 from Paris Charles de Gaulle to Abu Dhabi
49,000 Flying Blue miles for my flight with Oman Air in business class on the Boeing 787-9 Dreamliner from Muscat to Frankfurt

The current promotion allows you to earn 120,000 Flying Blue miles when signing up for the Flying Blue American Express Platinum card. Enough miles for a round trip in business class with Oman Air from Amsterdam to Muscat.

Apart from the miles I redeemed, I also had to pay the taxes and fees. For the Etihad flight, I paid € 288,02 which is quite high. For the Oman Air flight, I paid € 84,06 which is quite reasonable.

Bahrein – my 86th country

So far, I visited 85 countries so Bahrein would be my 86th country. Visiting Bahrein had nothing to do with the awards flights. I just wanted to spend some days in the Middle East and was looking for new places to go. Since I already visited other places like Kuwait, Dubai, Abu Dhabi and Salalah, I opted for visiting Bahrein.

Over the past few years, I only visited countries I already visited before. I did visit new places in these countries though. Last year, I visited 5 new countries: Montenegro, Lithuania, Estonia, Macedonia and Bosnia.

Hotels

Of course, I also needed places to stay during this trip. Unfortunately, there weren’t any interesting redemption options available for me. I either didn’t have the points needed or there simple wasn’t any interesting option to redeem my hotel points. I couldn’t have chosen for booking hotels through American Express travel but these hotels were either quite expensive or the location was not that interesting.

In Doha, I decided to stay at the W Doha, a brand I never stayed at so I was really excited about what to expect. In Bahrein, I stayed at the Hilton Bahrein where I earned 2K bonus points with the Points Unlimited Promotion. And in Muscat, I stayed at the Mövenpick Ghala Muscat which is also a brand I never stayed at so far.