Stahlke Adoption

Airline Tickets

Because we learned our appointment date last Thursday, we could still obtain 14-day advance plane tickets by midnight Friday. We telephoned our travel agent, an adoption specialist in Florida, who found tickets for us on Lufthansa.

Adoption fares are similar to bereavement fares. You can obtain them on short notice, and return dates are easily changeable or open-ended. Because of the 14-day advance, however, it was cheaper for us to buy regular tickets and pay change fees than to obtain an adoption fare. The price of our flight is excellent--$968 round-trip per person from Chicago to Kyiv via Duesseldorf going and Munich returning. We will buy Mikola's ticket later, since it's not possible to purchase a ticket without knowing the person's name, and we haven't given Mikola his English name yet. (That's another blog post!)

It was not possible to use my friend's frequent flyer miles, since seats of that type were not available on the dates we need to travel. I will be sending her our flight itinerary, however, because she wants to telephone the airline, tell them our story, and see if they will retroactively let us use her miles. But if that doesn't work, the adoption fund at our church will cover the cost of the tickets. The donations that so many people have made are a HUGE help to us.

posted by Stahlkes @ 9:17 AM