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Chris had a work trip to Europe and I had time in my schedule to join him for a long weekend in Berlin, where his work trip ended. Since we have some friends there, our primary goal for this trip was to catch up with them; sight-seeing was a secondary objective.

Flight details:

• Chris flew for work to Amsterdam on American Airlines. Since he had to hit the ground running, I managed to use a SWU to upgrade his flight to business class. As SWUs are getting harder and harder to use for long-haul flights, this was a minor miracle in my book!
• Sadly, the days of Air Berlin and direct flights to Berlin are long past us. So I flew to Berlin in economy via LHR on AA and BA. Chris and I flew back together on BA and I applied SWUs to those flights, but there was a mechanical delay on the BER-LHR leg that caused us to miss our LHR-ORD flight. Long story short, instead of arriving home in the evening on Monday, January 16, 2023, we arrived 12 hours later than scheduled on Tuesday morning, January 17th. This netted us UK261 compensation of EUR 600 each, as well as extra incurred travel costs.
• Total spent: my ticket was $782.75, Chris’ was covered by work. I also burned 3 SWUs.
• Total gained: 1200 EUR, about $1300. Not too shabby!

Hotel details: Grand Hyatt Berlin, three nights, 12K Hyatt points each plus a Suite Upgrade Award. This was fantastic (and my last Hyatt stay as a Globalist, I think). The Suite Upgrade Award got us a corner King suite, which was incredibly comfortable. Maybe too comfortable: I ended up napping quite a bit during this trip!

Food details: two out of our three evenings were spent with friends, so not much to report on here. The culinary highlight of this trip was our Berlin Food Tour with Walk With Us Tours. Alex, our guide, was delightful with lots of stories on his upbringing in the former East Berlin. Since it was January, we were the only participants on this tour, so we had a private guide as we ate our way through the Prenzlauer Berg neighborhood. The biggest surprise for me was how architecturally stunning this area was: I was expecting more Brutalist design, but many of the buildings predate WWII and Soviet influences to the Prussian era instead. The tour also emphasized the sustainability of Berlin’s food scene and we had a great discussion on the difficulty of supporting sustainability versus so much green-washing that big food providers are engaging in. This tour deliberately skips the currywurst (which is fine, but we’ve had it!) and instead offered us senfeier (mustard eggs), regional meats & cheeses (along with beer and wine), cookies and savory croissants, vurstchen and east German potato salad, and ended with cake and coffee. We were so full afterwards! Thank goodness for the walking tour to help keep up our appetites.

Other details: we also visited the German Spy museum, devoted to the history of spies and espionage particularly during the Cold War. Both Chris and I got a kick out of this museum because we had recently watched and read Mick Herron’s Slow Horses books and TV show (and because Chris is generally a fan of Cold War spy fiction). When we had dinner with friends that evening, we learned that the Spy museum is also a favorite for children’s birthday parties, so we had something to chat about with their kids!