Holiday to Indian Wells in Mar 2025: Day 1 – Prep

The Vickster is looking forward to this one. Her first time visiting Indian Wells for the ATP/WTA Masters 1000 tournament. She has already completed her grand slam of the Australian Open, French Open, Wimbledon and US Open. She’s keen – that’s all that needs to be said on the matter.

It was originally booked as a Dublin to the US and return to Spain open-jaw trip. I’ve booked a couple of these now. Don’t ask me why that route comes up as a relatively cheap deal, but it does.

Come back to Dublin (rather than Spain) and it costs about £200 more (if my memory serves me well). Weird! But we are not too bothered about the why.

The original routing was a BA booked AA share-coded trip, from Dublin to Heathrow, onto New York JFK, then Phoenix and finally onto Palm Springs.

On the basis that BA has buggered up my plans for retaining GGL this year, we decided to take the opportunity to upgrade the trip. That’s when the troubles began.

BA had utilised AA married segments from Heathrow to New York and on to Phoenix, which meant that it was a nightmare trying to find available I class business seats (at short notice), so that I could apply an upgrade voucher to get us into First Class.

Why BA had to take that approach, I’m not quite sure, but it caused us a massive issue.

Without going into more detail, we ended up simplifying our trip to Dublin to Heathrow to Los Angeles and paying a bit more. We will then be driving from LA down the coast to Dana Point and then on to Palm Springs for the tennis.

Irrespective of the challenges involved in booking it, we were very much looking forward to our trip!