Prologue
A semi-tradition among many American Jewish families is to celebrate their children’s bar or bat mitzvahs with a trip to Israel. After several postponements due to job changes, relocations, and pandemics, we finally upheld our parently duty and brought the family to the "other" holy land, in what may have been the last chance before our now-17-year-old daughter heads off to college in 2023.
Spending north of $10,000 on 4 round trip tickets was not realistic. Fortunately, with a couple years of careful planning, the good people of Chase and Citibank were there to help us out. The Mrs. had a citi AA business card that had a signing bonus of I think 100,000 miles (?) and I got a Chase Sapphire Reserve when the 100,000 bonus was offered last year.
Outbound Flights:
KLM 610: SLC (Salt Lake City) Friday July 8, 9pm > AMS (Amsterdam) Sat July 9, 2:25 pm
KLM 461: AMS Sat July 9, 9:05 pm > TLV (Tel Aviv) Sun Jul 10, 2:35 am
130,000 FlyingBlue points transferred from Chase Ultimate Rewards + $361 in taxes for 4 passengers including luggage.
We could have gotten them for 100,000 miles if we were willing to fly 2 days later, but vacation time is scarce and miles are plentiful.
KLM considers Israel part of Europe, whereas American Airlines considers it part of the Middle East, with much higher mileage requirements well beyond what was in our accounts. So we had to fly home from somewhere in Europe. We chose Italy, a country we love visiting and that isn’t too far from Israel.
This meant we needed to get from Israel to Italy. We had planned to mostly visit some family friends who live in Padova (Padua), near Venice. The best method seemed to be to buy tickets on RyanAir, the European unbundled low-fare airline. Since the TLV-Venice flight was only on Tuesday, we instead opted to fly TLV to Bologna on Monday, which gave us 4 full days in Italy. Ergo:
Transit Flight:
Ryan Air 6281: TLV Mon Jul 18 11:50 am > BLQ (Bologna) 2:40 pm
$365.38 for 4 passengers including luggage and early checkin. We splurged for the family fare which allowed us to check bags and check in at the airport. Without bags, it would have been about 50% less.
The originally planned return flights were on Saturday July 23, Milan > London > Phoenix > Salt Lake City on British Airways, for 100,000 AA Advantage Miles + $850 due to the ridiculous Heathrow and BA surcharges. However the PHX-SLC leg was canceled.
