In mid November, my family and I received a call that necessitated all of us to be in Chennai as soon as possible. This led to a bit of frantic planning as you will see. After getting both my parents on an Emirates flight out of Washington DC, I had to work through the day and then look for a routing that would get to Chennai. If you’ve seen how the last year has been in travel, you’ll know that revenge travel has been in full force. As a result a lot of the regular flights that you would take into Chennai were completely sold out. It also doesn’t help that many regular operators to India had scaled back operations as a result of the pandemic and had not yet resumed their services. Cathay Pacific out of Hong Kong are an example of the aforementioned. Services out of Toronto have also been extremely busy and very expensive last minute as you can imagine.

I found a great fare out of DCA, a smaller Washington Airport mainly used domestic travel. The route would start at DCA and take me to JFK on Delta with the following two flights being on Virgin Atlantic to London and onwards to Delhi. I then had to book a flight to DCA. My only options were a redemption ticket from Toronto to DCA via Newark on United. Yes, this would mean I would head to both major NYC international airports within a couple hours of each other. Finally, and not my wisest decision, but I actually booked my flight from Delhi to Chennai on Air India using Aeroplan points while I was inflight from London to Delhi. Cabin Classes would be economy for the positioning flight, Virgin Atlantic’s Premium Economy which they call just ‘Premium’, and business class on Air India on the final sector. It was many sectors, but my journey was quite comfortable

The return sector positioning flight from Chennai to Delhi was done on Indigo, India’s current biggest airline. I had the opportunity to catch up with an old friend in Delhi for dinner before taking an early morning departure on Virgin Atlantic’s service from Delhi to London and then onwards to New York in Business Class. Followed by a short hop back to Toronto on American the following day in Comfort Plus.