Welcome to my next trip report series, which covers a trip that I recently wrapped up. This included first class flights on Starlux Airlines, business class flights on Philippine Airlines, and stays at four luxury hotels in Japan. Of course there will also be lounge reviews. I must say, I’ve got some strong opinions on some of these experiences, so I can’t wait to share them.

This was a review trip, plain and simple, with which I had a couple of primary motivations. First of all, prior to this trip I had flown almost every first class product in the world, with Starlux Airlines and Air Côte d’Ivoire being the two exceptions .

Given how close I am to having checked out every first class experience in the world, I made it a goal to check out those two remaining products before the end of the year. Fortunately we recently saw the introduction of a more attractive way to book Starlux first class, so I decided to knock that out first.

For the return trip, I found a good business class fare on Philippine Airlines, allowing me to check out the carrier’s new flagship Airbus A350-1000 , ahead of the airline joining oneworld .

I decided to make Japan the focus of this trip, and also took the opportunity to check out one hotel in Tokyo and three hotels in Osaka. So as you can see, I was actually able to spend a fair bit of time on the ground with this trip, while still checking out some interesting airline products.

Below is the map of the itinerary I flew (at least the portion I’ll be reviewing, excluding positioning flights), which covers four segments and 16,755 miles. That’s a downright chill trip, by my standards!

I often book super complex itineraries, so this one was actually pretty straightforward.

For the outbound, I flew Starlux Airlines first class from Los Angeles (TPE) to Taipei Taoyuan (TPE) to Tokyo Narita (NRT), with the first segment on the Airbus A350-900 , and the second segment on the A350-1000 . I booked the following for 120,000 Starlux COSMILE miles plus $306.20 in taxes and carrier imposed surcharges: