Yes, This Is Real Life Part 10 - Royally Jordanian

Yes, This Is Real Life- Preview

Yes, This Is Real Life Part 1- Location, Location, Location

Yes, This Is Real Life Part 2- Brits In Beantown

Yes, This Is Real Life Part 3 - Shades On, Wheels Up

Yes, This Is Real Life Part 4 - Welcome to Ghost Port

Yes, This Is Real Life Part 5 - When You Layover During Ramadan

Yes, This Is Real Life Part 6 - Birds In Doha

Yes, This Is Real Life Part 7 - Dealing With Dragons

Yes, This Is Real Life Part 8 - A Place Most Exceedingly Rare

Yes, This Is Real Life Part 9- I Still Can't Believe This Is Real Life

This is not a post about flying Royal Jordanian.  I have, to date, not flown Royal Jordanian.  It is, however, a post about transiting their home airport of Amman, Jordan in all of 90 minutes, and I thought it a rather snappy title. 

Even for me, this day of flying pushed the ridiculous.  Now that I'd been re-routed, my layover was shorter and I literally flew the same plane in and out of Jordan right back to Doha.  It was about a three hour flight each way.  I had the same cabin crew, and even the same seat.  You've just got to laugh sometimes.  My flight attendant sure did.

So, here's how it went-

I left the lounge, and boarded on time for AMM.  They fly a a330 between these cities, which is still definitely a widebody plane, but not as big as the 777 or the 350.  The seats are lie flat, but not nearly as spacious as the 777 seats, or the 350 seats.  It's still fantastically comfortable for this length of flight, and would be fine for an overnight as well.  The cabin is laid out in a 2-2-2 configuration, so the window seats don't have aisle access.  Once again, I had no one next to me.

Instead of a pre departure beverage, since it was Ramadan and they weren't serving alcohol on any planes flying soley between middle eastern destinations, the cabin crew came around to offer coffee and dates while the rest of the flight boarded.  They did serve a meal on the flight, but also offered a boxed meal to go to passengers observing the holy month.



Regional amenity kit

I ordered the ful medames (quickly becoming my local go-to, the same way I always grab a bowl of congee in Asia) and pita as a snack, and kicked back to watch the IFE and doze a bit.  The flight went quickly, and we arrived on time to AMM.  Here's where the fun started.

Now,  I've done several transfers between itineraries like this, where you can't check in for your onward flight until you get on the ground at the destination, and so you don't have a boarding pass to clear transfer immigration.  The most hair raising example of this was definitely going through Jakarta, an experience I'd prefer not to repeat...but if I'm honest...I probably will at some point.

I had asked if I could get my AMM-DOH boarding pass on leaving DOH, but since the itinerary was technically a separate one way ticket AMM-DOH-IAH, they couldn't print it.  They did, however, print me the read out of the booking details so I had that to hand over in AMM.



Waaaaiiiittting to get my passport back

The transfer desk/area doesn't have a Qatar agent at it, and so I had to hand over my passport to an airport employee who then left to go down to the ticketing desks to procure my boarding pass.  This is simply never a good feeling, but is unfortunately how it's done many places.  I had to wait 30+ minutes for him to return, all the while staring out the window at the plane I arrived on, and was scheduled to depart on shortly.



Finally made it back upstairs- AMM Airport

The total transfer time I had available was only 90 minutes, so by the time I cleared security and was sent back to the departures level, I just headed back to the plane and boarded a few minutes later.  This was quite entertaining to my flight crew, especially as I was in the exact same seat as before. 

It went something like this:

FA: Welcome, boarding pa... Oh, it's you again!

Me: Um, yep. Again.

FA: Seat?

Me: 4F, again, apparently.

FA: (Laughs)  You missed us?

Me: It's a long story...

On arrival back at DOH, I took a few minutes to check out the arrivals lounge, simply because I hadn't been before and I'd gotten in earlier than the prior two days.  It's reserved for business and first class arriving passengers, and is located past security.  There's a made to order menu, not as extensive as the airside lounges, but plenty of options, as well as drinks, places to relax, and showers.  I didn't spend too long, just enough to get a look around.



Arrivals lounge seating



Menu

Since I also had the 'stopover package' for this night, I'd stopped and been given my hotel and meal voucher, as well as my info for the free shuttle before clearing immigration.  As seemed to be the most common set up, I'd been given a night at the Oryx Rotana hotel, which while not the Ritz, is still quite a nice hotel to have for free.  It's not in the main part of town, or up by the Pearl, but since it caters to one night stopovers that's no big issue.

After a short shuttle ride, I was checking in to my third and final hotel of the weekend.  How the last night went, is coming up.

 

~CruisingAltitude

 

Read next: Yes, This Is Real Life Part 11: Up All Night To Get Miles

Mileage Run Preview: Yes, this is real life.

"Double window addiction"

First off- I finished writing up my Havana trip!!  Final post with all the other links in it here!

Okay, so, I figure at this point that of the people who are reading this blog still at this point, 95% of them have classified me as certifiably crazy, 3% are other mileage runners I've met along the way, and 2% are my Mom and Mrs. CruisingAltitude, although at this point I have good intel...the BEST intel...that they don't even read most of it. 

However, I'm of the opinion that my next mileage run is totally something the average person would entirely enjoy.  It's fully understandable to fly in and out of Doha 3 times in 4 days, right? Right.

Here's how this came about- As you probably didn't read (mostly because it was a whopper of a mileage run, and I haven't finished posting it yet) in February, some brave souls and I flew entirely around the world in 80 hours.  The main flight that got us there was from Columbo, Sri Lanka to Boston via Doha.  It was a round trip booking, but that trip only used half of it, so I have the return flight to take in about a week. This, of course, leaves me 'stranded' in Columbo.  So, what's a mileage runner to do?

Well, go to Cairo, of course.  Okay, sure, Cairo isn't exactly on the way back from Columbo to Los Angeles, but hear me out. Remember when the Egyptian pound got un-pegged and took a tumble last year?  No?  Well, it did.  This suddenly made tickets that booked in that currency 'cheap.'  This is one of the strange hidden benefits of booking tickets that start around the world if you get lucky.  So, I found a very cheap one-way business class ticket from CAI to Houston through Doha on Qatar and booked it.  You have to admit that though Cairo isn't exactly 'on the way' from Sri Lanka, it is at least closer than many other places are.  So, I figured that one way or another I could connect those flights.  It's a doable, but fairly expensive mileage flight since Sri Lanka is considered 'Inidian Subcontinient' and Cairo is considered "Africa" for purposes of Oneworld partner awards, but it was an option. 

Then, as it turns out, the Sri Lankan Rupee wasn't having a great time (I assumed) and Qatar has a lot of capacity and competition from Sri Lankan, which is also a Oneworld partner, out of CMB this year.  What this resulted in was another cheap one-way ticket find a few months later for a business class itinerary from CMB to Cairo through Doha, also on Qatar.

So..... that gets me to and from Columbo with just the need for a couple domestic positioning flights- one to Boston to start it, and one back from Houston to finish it.  Since I have to be in Houston that month for work anyway, the latter takes care of itself this time around.

If you didn't bother to sort out all that nonsense, I can encapsulate it this way- I'm spending the weekend flying around the Middle East and India in business class, spending each night in Doha.  I'm going to have between 8 and 15 hours on the ground inn Doha each night, and about 7 hours in Columbo to actually leave the airport and see a few things.

All in all, it's made up of 5 different itineraries, 9 flights, 7 airports, and only two airlines - American and Qatar.  Should be fun...

"The Pearl" Qatar

So..

Now...

Wait for it....

.....Keep waiting

Okay....yes, what follows is real life.....


Imagine at this point in reading (or as I did, writing) this post you took a break to get on a flight, wait out said flight's delay, fly to Houston, land at 2am, get luggage, Uber to a hotel and pass out for the night.  Then imagine you wake the next morning to an inundation of texts/emails/news alerts blaring that Qatari planes are being banned from one airspace after another indefinitely.  First are Saudis, then the UAE, and next ...of course.... is Egypt.....followed by the Maldives, Mauritius, part of Syria...the list continues...

Well.  This sucks.

Update to now, and it's been a strange week.  I'm currently in the middle of an unrelated work trip, and have had to spend every break trying to call Qatar to get some kind of help with this situation.  I have called the US number probably 20 times, sat on hold for hours, finally broke down and started trying to call their worldwide offices - London, Sydney, you name it.  I even filled out a 'call back' form days ago.  They called me back too late, and the call was actually coming from Doha, so I probably paid a few bucks to tell them so.

I finally, finally, managed to get someone on the phone late yesterday and they hung up on me once they saw my travel plans.  I ....think....it was unintentional.  I eventually got past the point of annoyance and just moved on to disbelief.  The specter of flying to Sri Lanka without knowing how exactly I was getting home, even for me is a little much.  Just a little.

After another hour of hold time, I got someone else on the phone and tried to explain myself.  It was a long explanation.  Fixing one itinerary in this mess is a lot, fixing two when they include a tight turn around in a city they can't fly to is something else entirely.  

I have to give credit where it's due though.  It took over an hour of work, but the agent eventually got it done, though not without putting me on short holds to (I assume) control herself since something about my travel plans she found particularly hilarious.  I can't imagine why.  At one point I think I heard her coworkers in the background, also laughing at me.  The words "why wouldn't you just go direct" came up more than once.  I can only imagine the scene at a call center someplace.  I feel reasonably famous.  

But nevertheless she persisted, and re-routed me on a turnaround to Amman, Jordan instead of my Cairo flights.  I'll take it. We're friends now, and apparently I 'made her day.'  That's really all I'm after with this anyway.

So, where does that all leave us?  Well it currently leaves me sitting in the Houston Centurion lounge having a latte and writing about it.  Next up is a quick hop IAH-CLT-BOS to get this thing started.  Everything's cleared for the upgrades, and it looks like a good day to fly!

Wish me luck,

~CruisingAltitude

Read Up Next- Location, Location