How We Avoided the Fairbanks Red-Eye

Is Alaska Airlines First Class the best way to reach Fairbanks, Alaska in winter — or was the real travel hack avoiding the red-eye home? We flew four Alaska Airlines First Class segments between Dallas-Fort Worth, Seattle, and Fairbanks for our Northern Lights trip. That meant four flights, four different First Class meals, a small-airport departure from Fairbanks, and one very deliberate decision: instead of taking an exhausting overnight red-eye home, we built in a 15-hour layover at the Seattle Airport Marriott so we could get real sleep before the final flight back to Dallas. In this video, we review the full travel strategy from DFW to Fairbanks and back, including Alaska’s Boeing 737-890 First Class seats, the Plaza Premium Lounge at DFW, Fairbanks International Airport, the Seattle Airport Marriott overnight, and all four Alaska First Class meals. The meals included a cheese plate, the Tillamook cheeseburger, a surprisingly excellent lemon pesto chicken pasta, and a shrimp vermicelli noodle bowl that was memorable for all the wrong reasons. We also break down the total cost of the trip — $4,988 for the flights and Seattle overnight — and score the experience using the Travelled Well Scorecard. Would you rather power through a red-eye to get home sooner, or add a hotel night and arrive rested? Let us know in the comments. Subscribe to Travelled Well:    / @travelledwell   Next up: We review the Hyatt Place Fairbanks — the northernmost Hyatt in the world. 00:00 4 Flights, 4 Meals Strategy 00:27 DFW Airport & Lounge Check-in 01:41 Flight 1: First Class Cheese Plate 04:35 Flight 2: The Tillamook Burger 06:20 Outbound Journey Scorecard 07:14 Fairbanks Winter Travel Tech 07:40 How to Avoid the Red-Eye 08:06 Fairbanks Airport Tour 09:25 Flight 3: Lemon Pesto Chicken 10:34 Seattle Airport Marriott Overnight 12:12 Flight 4: Inedible Meal Disaster 14:20 Alaska First Class Meal Ranking 14:38 Total Cost & Scorecard Analysis 15:58 Is Comfort Worth the Price? #AlaskaAirlines #FirstClass #Fairbanks #TravelledWell #AirlineFood #SeattleLayover #NorthernLightsTrip #TravelStrategy #DFWAirport #FairbanksAlaska #FirstClassMeals