Aller Simple, A Foreign Concept

Aller simple means a one-way ticket.

Quite a frightening concept for me.  It can mean many things, most literally travel.

It can also mean selling a house, quitting a job, giving something up.  It means you don't plan to go back.

Most things can be reversed or changed, most places can be revisited even if it's not the same the second time. 

Normally we buy our airline tickets aller retour, a round trip.  We're considering booking a one-way ticket for future travel.   It's gotten a bit complicated. 

The airlines haven't made it easy for us to travel in style.  We hoard our frequent flyer miles, trying every possible way to use them to our advantage.  The frequent flyer programs, like the health insurance companies change the ground rules all the time, always to our disadvantage.

The alternative is grim; a coach or premium coach seat for 11+ hours, sharing a bathroom with 50+ people who all want to use it at the same time, terrible food with small portions, tiny seats with enormous next-seat neighbors.

We thought we finally had enough miles to buy Business Class seats round trip.  Yeah!  Champagne and movies for 11 hours.   We'd maximized our miles using a credit card that added miles to our program in addition to the miles earned for travel.  We have one credit card in Euros and one in US Dollars.  We've worked it as hard as we can, we organize, negotiate, research, save.  

We negotiated between each other for weeks, juggling our obligations and interests to select the best travel dates.  We researched the internet to find the best flights so that when we called we wouldn't be pushed into an itinerary with stops in cities we don't want to ever visit.

I might add that even though Air France and Delta Airlines now share planes and code-share, they don't share frequent flyer programs and even though Delta uses Air France planes to go to Paris, they won't book flights as far in advance as Air France will for the same flight.   Unless you specify otherwise, if you fly to France on either Delta or Air France, they will try to award the miles on Delta.   If you call from France, you get Air France not Delta. If you call from the US, you can't speak with someone from Air France, only Delta.  How did they ever figure out this complicated and silly system?  I'm sure a lot of highly paid people spent a lot of time on this. 

We called Air France Flying Blue program.  A nice man informed us that we can't share our miles or gift them to each other so we only have enough miles for two one-way tickets, which he'd be happy to book.  We booked them but haven't bought them yet.  Our idea was that we could call Delta and use our Sky Miles for the other half of the ticket.  Au Contraire.  On Air France using Flying Blue miles, the cost of a one-way ticket is 50% of a round trip ticket.  Makes sense.

Delta's rules are completely different for the same flight, same seats, same plane. On Delta, a one-way ticket using miles is the same price as a round trip ticket.  If we had enough miles to fly round trip, we would have called them first. 

So, now we have a lot of miles that we can't use and a one-way ticket to France.  We'll get back to the US somehow.