Hey, a little creative writing for a Saturday morning.
I know IAH is under construction so it's more confusing than it used to be but, including the fact that he was flying his family International Business Class was a classic TexAgs move (not a big deal since we all make $200K anyway).
When I was flying Business Class to/from Australia, it was between $6,000 - $13,000 per round trip ticket.
I know other destinations are cheaper - I think you can do Jeddah, Saudi Arabia round trip for about $3,000 in Business Class on Saudia (no alcohol). In any case, a minimum $12,000 spend (or comp'd) for a family of 4.
For playing along, here's my funny Alitalia accidental First Class story.
We were headed home to Saudi Arabia from Houston, probably 1984 because that was when we went to Egypt after going to Italy.
We check in at Houston and they can't issue boarding passes for the connection to Rome. We'll have to get those when we arrive at JFK. Probably something about codesharing between airlines.
So we get to JFK and at the Alitalia counter, they issue all six of us boarding passes but they're spread out all over the aircraft. I didn't care because I was 14 and didn't want to sit with my parents anyways but my 3 y/o sister needed to sit near my mom for sure (side note - my sister had status on PanAm at age 3).
When we were boarding - late due to the connection from Houston, the old Italian purser sees our boarding passes and that we're a family and that we're spread out all over the aircraft. He says this will not work, you're a family.
Now I'm thinking when he says this won't work, that he means we're not going to be allowed to board and we're going to have to wait until tomorrow or something. He says, I will fix this.
We wait there at the gate and after a few minutes, he comes to get us and says everything is taken care of, follow him. As we finish our walk down the jetway, he turns left. I've never turned left before.
He marches us up to the nose of the aircraft where there are only two seats on each side of the plane and he parks us in seats A&B, Rows 1-3. There were a few complaints I could overhear from the First Class passengers who weren't too happy about having an American family with 4 kids in First and having to rearrange their seating but... they got over it.
And that's my story about how important Family is to the Italians.
