I’m Flying To Paris (For A Special Reason), Via Bogota!

It’s going to be an exciting few days here at OMAAT, so let me explain the details of the trip that I just put together, which will be commencing shortly…

I’m flying to Paris via Bogota in Avianca business class

I’m headed to Paris very shortly, and I’m excited about the routing that I’m taking, and I think many OMAAT readers will be as well. I’ll be flying from Miami (MIA) to Paris (CDG) via Bogota (BOG) on Avianca, as one does.

The first segment will be on the carrier’s Airbus A320 business class, which is somewhere between a proper business class and an intra-Europe business class, based on my impression. Then the second segment will be in Avianca’s 787 business class, which I haven’t flown in roughly a decade, but which was recently rebranded, and apparently improved.

I managed to redeem Avianca Lifemiles for the ticket. The absolute lowest saver award cost wasn’t available, but I could book the ticket for around 90,000 Lifemiles, and given the 25% transfer bonus, I consider that to be quite a good deal.

So, what should I expect from Avianca, on the scale of awful to awesome? While I see mention online of Avianca getting Wi-Fi, it appears that currently most A320s and 787s don’t have Wi-Fi, so my apologies in advance for somewhat sporadic posting, as it’s not often I take this long of a routing without inflight Wi-Fi!

The reason I’m flying to Paris…

Why am I flying to Paris? Well, as I recently wrote about, Air France is launching its new La Premiere first class, and it’s debuting between Paris (CDG) and New York (JFK) as of Tuesday. Air France invited me (and some others) to be on the inaugural flight and experience the product, and I accepted the invitation.

I generally have a policy of booking all of my flights on my own, and I don’t take flights via media invitations, since I like to review experiences independently. The last flight I accepted an invitation for a commercial flight was 15 years ago, and it’ll probably be another 15 years before I accept another invitation. Heck, I generally don’t even attend media events, for the same reason I don’t accept comped flights.

Why did I accept an invitation this time around, and make an exception? I tried to approach it practically. The inaugural flight exclusively has media in first class, and it wasn’t even possible to book a first class ticket via any other means. So rather than on principle avoiding this experience and having several people beat me to the punch on reporting about this new product, I’m going to give y’all as much “live reporting” as I can, on Tuesday.

I’m already very familiar with the existing La Premiere first class product, so this trip isn’t about the service, food, etc. But I figure this flight is happening either way, and me choosing not to report on it doesn’t really benefit anyone. So I’m making an exception here, and still hope to review the full experience independently at some point in the future.

On Tuesday, expect tons of live coverage. We’ve still not actually seen any real pictures of the new cabins installed on the plane, so I can’t wait to see what they look like in person. My coverage will go beyond that, since Air France is reconfiguring its four cabin Boeing 777-300ERs tip-to-tail, so I’ll report back on everything.

Bottom line

I’m headed to Paris for a quick trip, flying Avianca business class on the outbound, and Air France La Premiere first class on the return. I’m excited to experience Avianca’s A320 and 787 business class, and of course I’m also excited to be on Air France’s first flight with its reconfigured 777s, and the new La Premiere.

I’m making a very rare exception by accepting a media flight, but I couldn’t turn down the opportunity to be among the first to report back on the new seat. So stay tuned, over the next couple of days there will be updates from my Avianca adventure, and then on Tuesday, I’ll have live coverage of the Air France experience.