Mrs. ATX Jetsetter and I just got back from a quick weekend trip to Baton Rouge to celebrate the wedding of my old college roommate. While we wouldn’t be in town very long, we still tried to cram as much into the weekend as possible and even had plans to attend one of the LSU Baseball NCAA Regional Tournament games. Unfortunately, the weather didn’t cooperate for the game but we still had a fun weekend exploring my old college town and seeing friends that I haven’t seen in years.
Booking Flights
Baton Rouge is typically a very high cost airport to fly into given the limited service and focus on government/business travel so I started my search on Google Flights looking at both BTR and nearby New Orleans (MSY). While I typically try to stay loyal to Delta and United, American and Southwest both have direct flights between Austin and New Orleans. Both of those flights were extremely expensive and even the one stop option on United via Houston was over $700 per person round trip. Surprisingly, American had a great fare into Baton Rouge through DFW for under $350 per person round trip. This also meant we wouldn’t need the hassle of a rental car either so it was a no brainer.
Also, thanks to my recent American Instant Status Pass, I would be able to utilize the priority lane, get a free checked bag, and have access to Main Cabin Extra seats at check. I even managed to clear an upgrade on the DFW-BTR leg that I was unable to capitalize on due to some delays.
Booking Lodging
With our flights set, I started looking at the available hotels. The wedding hotel was the Hilton Baton Rouge but, since I’m trying to requalify for Marriott status this year and work travel has slowed way down, I started my search on Marriott.com.
Having been to Baton Rouge many times for work since graduation, I knew there were two hotels that would fit the location criteria. The first, and one that I was excited to try was the Watermark, which is part of the Autograph Collection. Unfortunately, the price there was prohibitive given the fact we weren’t going to be spending much time in the room. Instead, I chose the nearby Courtyard Marriott which is a newer hotel located on 3rd street in the heart of downtown.
In this Trip Report
Day of Departure Changes
You may have noticed in the above section that, though we had booked a roundtrip flight on American, we ended up flying United for the outbound portion of our trip. Our inbound American flight from Charlotte took a rolling mechanical delay which ended up being over three hours, causing us to misconnect in DFW. We were rebooked onto a later flight into Baton Rouge which would cause us to miss our dinner reservation.
Thankfully, the American AAgent in Austin was extremely helpful as they worked through all of the people who had been impacted by the delay. She happily agreed to move us over to United at my suggestion and, after a few minutes of frantic typing, we had passes in hand for the flight. This also allowed us to get into Baton Rouge earlier than expected thanks to the much more direct routing. I’ll cover this more in detail in the next section.
Thanks for coming along on this quick trip over to Baton Rouge!
