Today, we made a lot of progress on plans for this trip, but that also means we spent money!
One of the first things we did today was to modify our reservation for our Igloo Cabin in Rovaniemi at the Apukka Resort. I had been wanting to rebook this cabin under a non-refundable rate, but I did not want to cancel our existing reservation through Booking.com without knowing that cabin would be available to reserve again under a non-refundable pricing. I tried to find a way to modify the existing booking on booking.com, but I could not find a way when I opened the reservation there. I could upgrade, but not change what I already had. We had decided t this point in time that we were going on the trip, so paying extra to have a refundable reservation no longer made sense, and it only bought us a short amount of time, we still had to pay everything before November 20, 2024 anyway.
I went to the booking.com website this morning to look at the reservation so I could correctly identify the name of our cabin for the blog. I initially did not open our reservation, I just did another search for the same dates and when I chose the Apukka Resort, I saw that there was another cabin available, the same as we had reserved initially.
I was now a little more comfortable canceling what we had since there was another one available that I could book right away without waiting to see if our reservation was released and our cabin was now available also.
I then remembered I had also seen where I could reserve cabins directly on the Apukka Resort website, so I went there to see what they showed was available. Sure enough, I could see that one additional cabin of our same classification The Aurora Cabin King was available there, so I started looking at their pricing before I canceled what we had on booking.com.
The Apukka Resort website was a little confusing, they had four different rates, two included additional amenities, one was strictly for non-refundable reservations, and one was for some reservation cancelation flexibility. I had to read the fine print on the “flexible” rate and found that for our reservation timeframe in January, even the flexible rate was not cancellable, but the overall rate was higher than the one that was solely non-refundable. If this sounds confusing, it was. There was no reason for me to use the flexible rate because there was no flexibility for the high season, which is the time we will be there.
Then I looked at the lowest rate and found that we were going to be saving about $750 if we used that rate compared to the refundable rate we currently had with booking.com. We had known it would be at least $350 if we just changed it on booking.com, but now we could get an even lower rate booking directly with the resort. The only concern I had was with some of the language on the initial page describing the different rates. It read like we might get an igloo cabin or a standard cabin using those first two rates for the reservation. However, when I selected the lowest rate, I was given selections for each cabin type, and the Aurora Cabin King was one of the selections, as well as several other cabin rates, some for larger igloo cabins, and some for family cabins.
I decided we would go with the reservation at the resort site, but first I wanted to cancel the booking.com reservation so that we would not have two reservations at the same time, which might cause some confusion. It was a little nerve-wracking, but I hit the cancel button and that was that, we were canceled at booking.com.
Next, I went into our cruise reservation and some other documentation I had to make certain I was selecting the correct dates for the new reservation at the Apukka Resort. I double-checked everything and put in the dates for the reservation and selected the Aurora Cabin King. I entered the credit card information and hit the reserve button after making one final check on the dates. The reservation was confirmed and that was settled, I was still a little nervous and now had a slight headache, the cost for the cabin was around $2,500 and now that was non-refundable. Well, it is just money……..
While I was on a roll, I decided it was also time to make our airline reservations since we were now set for our reservation in Rovaniemi. I had thought the pricing might go down a little waiting until the middle of the week, but it did not, it was the same price for flights as I have been getting for the past several days.
I went ahead and selected the dates and destinations and then selected the flights. There was one last decision to make on the return flight from London, did we leave early and get home early or leave London a little later and get home at midnight. The later flight also had a longer layover, the early flight layover was just 1 hour and 55 minutes, which seems long until Customs and Immigration are considered, as well as another round of security clearances after customs. We chose the earlier flight. I guess we can always take the later flight if we have some delays in travel that day. We opted for the early return.
I headed to the Delta Website to make our flight reservations, picking regular main cabin economy class so we could select our seats and have one free checked bag each. I looked at some options for Comfort +, but on one of the longer transatlantic flights going over, there were no good seats available, so we will just sat in regular economy. Plus, if we want to select better seats on any other flights, we will just do it on a flight-by-flight basis and try to use Delta miles for payment.
I used SeatGuru to make sure we were not selecting any bad seats on the longer flights. Once that was done, it was time to pay, and shortly thereafter, we received our confirmations. I had tried to apply for an American Express credit card during the reservation process, they were offering a $500 credit. However, I have a long-standing credit freeze with the major credit rating companies and they won’t let those applications go through instantly, so I missed it. I keep thinking I will remove that, it was from some fraud charges many years ago, but almost monthly, we seem to get some notification about credit breaches and offers for temporary credit tracking, so I just leave my credit freeze on. I am supposed to get a call to verify my identity when I apply for any new credit, but I seldom do, I had hoped it might work this time…it did not.
The only remaining major reservation is the flight from Rovaniemi, Finland to Bergen, Norway, and I hope to reserve that tomorrow, our credit cards need time to cool off from overuse today.
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