Around 9am in the morning of November 5th I got a fare alert notice. I’d been on Flyertalk already but hadn’t yet checked out the Mileage Run forum. Big news – the Tokyo and Osaka Hiltons were selling for $2 on Expedia, or I could spend an additional buck for an Executive level room.

I figured I’d be a sport and go $3 for the better room, since it came with breakfast, complimentary internet, and evening cocktails…

Originally Expedia and Hilton were only going to honor November bookings, at least that’s what they told the media, but I had it in writing (email, actually) that mine was a valid rate and they never once disputed this or tried to cancel it.

So with the lure of $3 rooms in Tokyo I thought that my wife and I ought to go.

(I actually also booked the Intercontinental Tokyo Bay at $3 on a separate Orbitz pricing glitch and was one of the few folks to have that reservation honored. I thought I’d switch hotels during my stay, especially since my wife had never been to any of the Disney theme parks and I thought I’d take her to Tokyo Disney. But in the end we decided to shorten our Tokyo stay and add Thailand into the mix, and to just take the direct bus to Tokyo Disney from Shinjuku Station instead of messing with changing hotels.)

We cashed in 240,000 USAirways miles for 2 First Class awards: Washington-Dulles to Tokyo in First on All Nippon Airways (ANA), Tokyo to Bangkok in First on Thai Airways, and then returning Bangkok-Tokyo (2-class Business Class) and Tokyo-Dulles in First on ANA.

Availability for 2 seats on the precise dates I wanted wasn’t any problem at all, one call put the flights on hold.

Planned a few months in advance I managed to arrange things at work to take a week and a half off.

So now I’m in the midst of that trip! I’m generally online throughout most of my travels, but since this one is vacation I’ve been quite remiss in blogging. But I’ll be catching up shortly.