For years we are Priorityclub member and we’ve a pretty high number of points. With those points you can get things for free. So we decided to use our points we’ve collected for a hotel stay if we find a nice but expensive hotel.

The start of our autumn/winter vacation will be in Miami and we decided to stay for 2 nights in the Miami Beach area. The Miami beach area is located on multiple man-made islands and has a beach directly to the atlantic ocean. But that also makes the hotel prices raise.

After checking the web we found some hotels from which one is the Crowne Plaza South Beach – Z Ocean Hotel. This is an all-suite boutique hotel with only 79 suites. It doesn’t has a direct overlook on the ocean from all rooms but the rooms look nice and it’s walking distance from the beach and only a 15 minutes drive from the airport.

And best of all it’s free with our points, so we are off to a good start for our vacation.

Yesterday I was earlier at home as usual because a technician from the Deutsche Telekom would come and solve our DSL issues. But he didn’t… I was annoyed and started searching for a flight for our annual autumn/winter vacation. Not ideal with a unstable DL connection but we used our iPhones as Personal Hotspot as well.

We debated a long time about our trip schedule this time. A couple ideas involved layovers and other cities like New York, Atlanta, Tampa and different departure airports Munich, Frankfurt and Nuremberg. But after searching for about 3,5 hours we found the following trip:

Departing flight: (Total flight time 15:56 hours)

1. Nuremberg > Amsterdam (KLM Fokker 70)
2. Amsterdam > Detroit (Delta Airbus A330-300)
3. Detroit > Miami (Delta Airbus A320-200)

Returning flights (Total flight time 15:15 hours):

1. Orlando > Detroit (Delta Boeing 757-300)
2. Detroit  >  (Delta Airbus A330-300)
3. Amsterdam > Nuremberg (KLM Fokker 70)

And that for an excellent price more then 200€ cheaper as with all other airlines for the same flight times. The only cheaper flight we found was with a total flight time from over 30 hous one way. So we decided to book the flight we were both excited and could select our seats and then in the very last step of the booking process the price went up by 212€, it wasn’t clear why and I was lucky that I didn’t click on the ‘Next’ button otherwise we would have paid the higher amount.

I was very disappointed by this and decided to call the KLM Service Center in Germany but they were not available at 21:15 anymore. But I found out that the KLM Service Center in the Netherlands is available 24/7. So I used Skype to call them and after waiting a bit I got an employee on the phone which explained me that there was nothing he could. I didn’t liked this answer and explained that I’ve seen the same on all 3 possible flight options, he put me on hold and went to his manager to ask or there were possibilities and than our internet connection broke down…

So I could again and got another service agent on the phone and explained him all the same and again he couldn’t do anything for me and again I disagreed with him. He went to the manager and they found a solution which was a bit difficult for them to realise so he would call me back. And at 22:45 he gave me a call and told us he had even lower flight prices for us. So we decided to book! Thanks for the excellent service KLM, I’m so happy I can speak dutch!

So florida here we come again after being there in 2010 for the last time. Next will be booking hotels and/or a villa. can’t wait to do this and I hope that booking process will be a bit easier…