To London and beyond

We have been working on our travel schedules for the fall, and currently it looks very promising. There should be one trip to London during September, combining business and pleasure, and another trip to Osaka and Seoul in November.

Both of the trips have been somewhat hard to plan — I can’t exactly pin down why, but it is probably related to Niilo getting older than two years and requiring his own seat in the airplane and a normal bed at the hotel. This hikes up all costs, and suddenly seemingly affordable hotel rooms or flights become pretty expensive.

I’ve also learned to hate every and all booking system that does not show the final prices, but you add a variable number of taxes, costs, and what-not to the final bill. In Japan, for example, some hotels are like 33% more expensive when the obligatory extras are calculated in. In the UK, some hotels have 12.5% “service charge” that is to be added to the invoice at the hotel, not in the web.

Despite these woes, we’ve got decent options and should finalise the trips this week.