We’ve been dying to get over to Asia to explore, but wanted to really maximize our time. We searched high and low and finally found a flight that would work. Air China has a flight that leaves every morning at 12:40am that goes to Singapore with a 10 hour layover in Beijing. Now, you might be thinking NOT A LAYOVER. We were actually looking for this. This gives us the chance to go see the Great Wall of China. We have a tour set up with Beijing Airport Transportation. Beijing allows tourist to be in the country for 72 hours visa free as long as you have a ticket proving you’ll be leaving within that window. The tour company will meet us at the Starbucks after we clear customs and in a private car drive us to The Great Wall of China and give us a tour. It is about an hour drive to the Wall, we will be at the Wall for about 1-2 hours and stop for lunch on the way back and then be dropped of at our gate! The tour guide will walk us to our gate. Not just dropping us off curbside but making sure we get to our gate. I’ve made all the arragnements with Beijing Airport Transportation (BAT) Tony was a great help and has answered any questions quickly.
We chose Air China because of the flight path and length of the layover. It works for us to be able to check another place off of our bucket list. Flying to Singapore we were going to have a layover somewhere, we just wanted to pick where as to maximize our travel days and be able to see as much as possible. Booking with Air China was a bit of a challenge. We tried booking our flight and the website kicked us out/timed out 3 times. The 4th time trying to book on airchina.com the flight had jumped $800 for the 2 of us (total). We tried calling airchina.com, but they were not helpful and there was a bit of a language barrier. We decided okay we will check the prices again in a few hours and just see. Sure enough about 2 hours later the prices had gone back to what they were originally and we were able to get them booked. We have the Chase Sapphire Credit Card, and ended up booking thru the travel department with Chase. We didn’t have any problems and it was an easy transition. We did also do a few searches on Expedia. If we fly Air China in the future, we will go ahead and book thru a 3rd party again. We did book business class. We haven’t done a flight that far in business class before and wanted to try it out to see if it is worth it. We figured we should be well rested with our seat being able to fully recline and get a good nights sleep.
