Rush hour

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It happened on a Friday late in the afternoon. I was at my desk feeding yet another redundant time management system with the weekly time report before calling it a day and heading home for the weekend. Little did I know that the stale boredom of the office routine was about to be changed rather abruptly. It started with an email forwarded by my colleague Patrick, one of those promotional blurbs from a travel website. However, sharing my passion for Asia (as well as having endured my endless bitching about wanting to go to Hong Kong or Bangkok but not finding any reasonably priced tickets) he had noticed flights to Asia starting at around 3500 SEK (that's roughly €400 or $500 for you int'l readers...) and figured it could be worth checking out. The campaign was run by esteemed airline Finnair which has come to be my carrier of choice in the past years, not only because they are neatly located in the proper eastern direction but because Scandinavian Airlines et.al. typically price themselves out of any chance to compete.

There was a catch though: the price would only be valid if booked on a Sunday. That's right, it was not the time of flight but the time of login and reservation that mattered. Thus there was no information available as to what these offers really entailed. It turned into an exciting and frustrating wait over the weekend.

Come Sunday morning and I anxiously shot out of bed in what must be record time and jumped the computer. And there it was, a hidden button that had suddenly become visible on the main page leading to the special campaigns. It turned out there were a lot of tempting prices to some of Finnair's common destinations in Asia, but the flights would have to be undertaken in full before the end of June, presumably because of low cabin factors. I scratched my head a bit and thought about the coming National Day holiday the following week. If I used the National Day as a travel day I could take an extended weekend in Hong Kong and only spend three days off work. An ad hoc holiday of this kind wouldn't exactly be welcomed with open arms by my clients or managers but when it comes to such an opportunity to return to Hong Kong I figured I could roll with the punches. Besides, there's always something outrageously jet-set about flying across the globe for a weekend, although it will not grant any environmental award.

After having found seats on suitable flights from Stockholm-Arlanda to Hong Kong via Helsinki the game got a bit more complicated; arranging the transit to Stockholm from Jönköping. Our puny international airport is anxious about increasing the passenger count, but as is always the case, everytime I look for flights there are rarely any available. I managed to find a one way ticket on the leg back home for 1000 SEK, but nothing was available on the way out. Taking the train is not an option, as it costs even more and the margin for error in regards to the time table was simply to short. This left the option of taking the express bus at an affordable 250 SEK, the catch being that it left Jönköping at 6.30 in the morning, giving me an ample opportunity to walk the airport back and forth a couple hundred times waiting for my onward connection.

Once everything was puzzled together came the real nail-biter; booking it all. As is always the case with ticket reservation systems you never know about the number of seats available, and without knowing it you could hold on to the very last seat while looking through the airline timetables. It is entirely possible to book non-refundable/non-changeable tickets for flight A only to realize that the onward flight B is suddenly sold out. Sure enough, it proved a disturbing and anxious experience as the flight between Helsinki and Stockholm dropped from my booking and I had to choose the next available one forcing me to reschedule my last flight back home to Jönköping another two hours later. Figures.

Once I was done booking flights, buses and a hotel in Hong Kong it was a little past nine in the morning and I was sitting there laughing hysterically at the prospect of my triumphant return to Asia's World City. And as it so happened, I had roughly two days to prepare myself and my surroundings for the trip...

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