no pain, no gain

And that goes for booking my flight to NYC with air miles too.

Because I've been flying to and around Asia so frequently in the past few years (YVR --> HKG x3 (06, 08, 09) and HKG --> NGB (09)), I only need to use $120 CDN to "buy" more airmiles in order to get a "free" ticket to NYC this summer.

Of course, since CX is technically only making $120 CDN off of me out of this transaction, there is no possible way that they will make it easy for me.

But again: no pain no gain. I've presevered through and defeated the site tech errors, the inconvenient flight times, the constantly-busy "24-hours help hotline", the pestering parents, the $100 Canadian airport tax and have now (I think) booked myself a vacation to NYC.