2023 retrospective

I’m a bit late this year on the retrospective summary because of having to deal with some backend technical issues on the blog. The good news is that I’ve now uploaded all my 2023 flights of note onto the blog.  So now, it’s time to take a look back through the year.  I use a webapp, BA97.com, to capture all my flights, some of which don’t actually make it onto the blog.  In general, these are short flights in economy (such as those within California).

One of my favorite features of the BA97 website is the ability to create and view retrospective summaries.  So here is what 2023 looked like for me:

I visited 24 airports over 39 flights and covered just over 58 000 miles across 12 airlines.  27 of these flights made it onto the blog.  I had a new job in 2023, so a lot of my flights were short, except for my chaotic November trip to Europe and Egypt.  Of the 24 airports I visited this year, 5 were new: Abu Dhabi, Cairo, White Plains NY, Palm Springs, and Venice.

Of the 27 flights that made it onto the travel blog, 5 were in First Class, 17 were in Business Class, none were in Premium Economy, and 5 were in Economy.  The scores for the flights at the lowest end were 9/25 for Lufthansa’s Economy Class from Venice to Frankfurt and 12/25 for Alaska Airlines’ Business Class from IAD to SFO. At the high end, we had four flights all achieving a 21/25: two American Airlines Flagship First Transcontinental flights (LAX-BOS and JFK-SFO in May but not in June), and Finnair’s London to Helsinki service in their new Business Class, and British Airways’ 777 in Club World Suite from SFO.

Like last year, I have a few statistics to share, and now that I have five years on the blog, I can start looking at some trends. The most common score this year was a 16/25, which was achieved by 3 flights (for example, ATL-LAX). The mean score was 17.8/25 and the median score was 17/25. A couple examples of these median flights are Etihad’s Abu Dhabi to Cairo service and American’s Flagship First Transcon from JFK to SFO in June.

After 4 years on the blog, there are 89 flights on the blog. The overall mean score is a 17/25, the mode is a 17/25, and the median is a 17/25, which is wild that these all match. With my scoring system, I use a 3 to mean “average” for every category except service, where I give that a 4, since being a flight attendant is hard. That means that the average number we see should be a 16/25. 17 is not very far from 16, so that suggests I’m doing a pretty good job of grading the flights on a normal distribution (bell curve). The number leaning slightly high is likely due to my tendency to not book flights that I think will be bad if I have a choice.

The flight I was most impressed by was definitely Etihad’s First Class flight from London to Abu Dhabi, if you completely exclude the lounge. That’s not particularly surprising given their world-leading First Class Apartment product, but I actually wouldn’t want to fly it on an overnight flight again unless we get another really good deal on it because the bench bed was so awful.

Of the 39 flights, 21 were in ‘Business Class’ (4 did not make it on the blog), which is a remarkably broad category that includes Domestic First Class, International Business Class, Transcontinental Business Class (but not this year), and European Business Class.  Of these 21, 1 was the result of a complimentary upgrade, 1 was upgraded with cash, 1 was upgraded with ‘points’, and 8 were on award tickets.  So, I only actually paid for Business Class for 11 of these. 

I took 5 flights in true First Class (i.e. on a plane that also offered Business Class): 3 domestic on American Airlines (one of which was a cash upgrade), 1 international on American Airlines, and 1 on Etihad (on an award ticket). 

I flew just over 58 000 miles in 2023. My top airlines by number of sectors were American Airlines and Alaska Airlines at 8 each, and my top airline by miles flown was British Airways (as usual).  I flew just under 18 000 miles with BA over 5 sectors, followed by American Airlines with only 14 000 miles (but 8 sectors).  Combined with 8 paid Alaska flights (for a total of 5 000 miles), this was enough flying to earn me Gold Status for another year.  I also travelled just over 7 000 miles on United flights, which was not enough to earn me any status with the airline.  Instead, I requalified for Elite Silver status through attaining Marriott Titanium Status.

I also had the opportunity to fly with two new carriers: Etihad and Egyptair.  Etihad was obviously the preferred carrier because of their amazing A380 product.  Unsurprisingly, I was not particularly enthralled by my Egyptair narrow-body business class experience, especially after missing out on Emirates’ First Class.

My longest flights this year were, unsurprisingly, my three flights between London and San Francisco.  At 5354 miles, this route ranks as the 6^th longest route I’ve flown.  My shortest flight was from IAD to Richmond on United.  At 100 miles, it is a flight I’ve flown many times before and ranks as my 4^th shortest route I’ve flown (and shortest that I’ve flown in the US).