I'm Valentin. Since 2022 I've kept a record of every flight I've taken — airline, aircraft, route, seat, cabin, lounge. Not for a blog and not for an audience: I just wanted to know what I was actually buying. This is what that record looks like, and what it taught me.
Family holidays, package trips, cruises, skiing, the classic German travel map — Mallorca, Turkey, Egypt, the Baltic, Tuscany, London. Real travel, but undocumented and mostly decided by someone else. It matters because it means I didn't start from zero. It also means I spent years travelling without ever asking what any of it was worth.
2022 is my year zero — not the start of my travelling, but the start of writing it all down.
A short European city trip on Eurowings. Objectively the least impressive trip on this page, and the most important one: it's the first flight I properly logged. At that stage I booked on price and hoped for the best, which is exactly the habit this guide exists to fix.
Frankfurt to Hong Kong with Cathay Pacific on the A350-1000. My first serious intercontinental trip, and the first time I paid attention to the product rather than just the destination — which airline, which aircraft, which seat, and whether any of it justified the fare. This is where my current way of thinking starts.
Nine days in Greater Tokyo, flown on Lufthansa's B747-8 — still economy, but an aircraft that made the trip feel like an event. London as a clean European city trip, and a hiking week in the Chiemgau to keep the whole thing from becoming purely an aviation hobby. Travel stopped being occasional and became a rhythm.
Vienna and Bratislava, with an Austrian business-class return — my first premium segment. Then Hong Kong as a base for Macau, Shenzhen and Taipei, with Lufthansa business short-haul and premium economy on the A340-600. Milan and Prague in between. Then the big one: Europe to China to New Zealand to Canada and back, with Air Canada's Signature Class on the 787-9 between Auckland and Vancouver. That year my map went global and my fares got complicated enough to need a method.
Portland and Seattle, with a United Polaris return from San Francisco. Boston on the Lufthansa A380, business on the way back, economy on the way out — premium where it mattered, not everywhere. Prague with Condor. Vienna twice, the second time as a 28-day working stay rather than a trip. And in September, Tokyo again: my first fully premium-cabin routing end to end, with Cathay's Aria Suite outbound.
I think this is the most useful thing I can tell you about myself, because it's the part most travel writing leaves out.
Measured by distance instead of by flight, the premium share looks better: 61.8 % economy, 13.1 % premium economy, 25.0 % business. Both figures are true and they tell different stories, which is precisely why I show both — a single percentage can be arranged to say almost anything, and airlines know it.
Seven flights in ten are still economy, and I have never flown first class. I am not a business-class traveller who occasionally slums it — I'm an economy traveller who has bought enough premium cabins to know exactly which of them are worth the money and which are a paint job. That is the position this guide is written from, and it's why most of it is about protecting yourself and getting fair value rather than chasing status.
"Know who you are paying, know what you are buying, and know what an hour of it is worth."
Three things came out of the tracking, and all three are in the guide. First: the gap between what an airline advertises and what it delivers is measurable, and once you've measured it a few times you stop being impressed by marketing. Second: most of the money people lose on travel is lost before departure, at the booking stage, to operators who count on you not checking. Third: a fare only makes sense compared to something — which is why I ended up working in €-per-flight-hour rather than arguing about whether a price feels high.
None of that requires my flight log. It requires the method the log produced, which is what I wrote down.
Four parts and a checklist — 15 €, instant download, yours to keep.
See what's inside →