Priority Club award rates are changing from 18 January 2012 with some new award categories and reclassification of some hotels between categories.

Hotel awards are generally fully refundable, so by booking awards now you have a bet each way – if award costs go up for that hotel you’ve saved the increase and if they go down you can cancel and rebook.

Each six months I look at how well connected by air countries are to each other – the Flight Connectivity Index (FCI).  Previous updates - FCI 30 June 2009, FCI 31 December 2009,  FCI 30 June 2010, FCI 31 December 2010 and FCI 31 June 2011.

Flight Connectivity Index (FCI)

The Flight Connectivity Index (FCI) value is the number of other countries to which you can fly directly from a given country, based on published schedules of IATA airlines. Domestic flights do not count. To simplify the calculation, countries are defined as members of United Nations, as opposed to using one of the many other country lists available.

With South Sudan joining the United Nations in the past six months there are now 193 member countries of the UN, and the maximum FCI score is 192.  Germany is the country with highest FCI at the moment, at 111 (+1 from a year ago and the highest index I’ve yet recorded).  Four countries have no flights and FCI score of 0 – these are Andorra, Liechtenstein, Monaco and San Marino.  The average FCI is 23.19, unchanged from December 2010.

Since the last update there has been the usual seasonal changes.  In the first half of 2011 most of the spring revolution countries (North Africa plus Syria) lost some connectivity.  In the second half of 2011 most of these countries saw normal air service resume.  Libya is the notable exception and in the past 12 months has seen the flight connectivity index reduce from 39 to just 10 – by far the biggest annual change in connectivity I’ve recorded to date (the next biggest annual change was Togo increasing their score by 10 in 2010).  Indeed, if we ignore the 2011 change in Libya’s connectivity the average FCI would be 0.30 higher.

More results after the jump.

Read More…

The post outlining all A380 routes and airlines has been updated with many changes including the first China Southern A380 routes and the planned first route for Malaysia Airlines (between Kuala Lumpur and London Heathrow in 2012).

As the number of A380 routes continues to grow the maps have been split into smaller regions.

There’s been union disputes for a while at Qantas, but the move to ground the international and domestic mainline fleet a day after the Qantas AGM is a surprise.

Latest Qantas updates at this link.

Affected flights (at time of writing)

Qantas operated international (and other airline codeshares on those flights)

Qantas mainline domestic

Unaffected flights (at time of writing)

Jetstar

Jetconnect (trans-Tasman flights except for A330 service between Auckland and Sydney)

Qantaslink domestic flights (numbered 1400 to 2699)

Qantas codeshare flights on other airlines

American AAdvantage is changing the qualification rules for lifetime elite status from 1 December.  Currently they have the most generous qualification rules of all airlines in that all mileage counts, even ones earned through credit card spend.  From 1 December 2011 further accrual towards lifetime elite status will only be for miles earned by flying. 

This is still at the more generous end of the spectrum of airline elite status qualification requirements (some frequent flyer programs have no lifetime status, or only count flights on their home airline).  The notice given for the change has been relatively short, which makes it difficult for some who wish to accelerate their earning to earn lifetime status before the rule change.

I’ve updated the full listing of lifetime elite frequent flyer status.

With many future trips booked it is unusual not to get a schedule change notification from an airline every day or so.  Most of the time these are relatively unimportant changes like flight renumbering by Continental and United, or a tweak of 5 or 10 minutes to the arrival and/or departure time. 

Nonetheless, I check the notifications fairly religiously just in case of a more significant change.  I’m glad I do this, for I’ve had some fairly nasty ones lately.

Case 1

An airline rebooked me on a flight the previous day.  Given the flight still operates on the date I had booked I don’t know why I was shifted by the airline.  Perhaps they could resell my seat for another fare on the day I’d chosen?  Or perhaps they got confused – I see the flight now shows as being 30 hours duration.  Hmmm.

As if shifting the date of travel wasn’t bad enough, the airline failed to spot they’d now given me a connection time of minus 20 hours between flights.  Oops.  Lucky I carefully read the change notifications and pay attention to dates as well as times.  They couldn’t even point a finger at another airline for such a basic mistake as I’m connecting between two flights with the same airline!

After some chasing up I have been restored to the date I was originally booked, but for some unknown reason they had to reissue the whole ticket and I see the coupons are now out of order.  That can’t be good.

Case 2

On an upcoming around the world ticket I have 6 flights with a particular airline.  All 6 flights have changed schedules (some more than once) and the latest iteration of changes (affecting all 6 flights) has created two problem connections.  One has 10 minutes between scheduled arrival time and scheduled departure time at the airport, during which time there is immigration and a terminal change.  Another is slightly better at just over an hour, but again has immigration in between flights.

Some playing around with airline schedules and my tight timeframes available and it looks like I may have to change several flights and reroute a couple of times to make it work again. 

In both cases I’ve had a look at the flight options and availability before calling the airline to sort it out so I can hopefully end up with a new itinerary that will work for me (albeit less ideal than my original booking in the 2nd case).  This helps when customer service agents may not think to check non-obvious solutions.

Being proactive instead of waiting until close to departure (or worse at the airport) maximises the chances I can get something to work out.  There are some situations where, for some people, waiting may be better – e.g. if looking for an excuse to cancel the ticket without penalty.

Mr Stuker is about to pass 10,000,000 miles flown on United Airlines.  That is a huge distance – over 400 times around the world, or 20 times to the moon and back.

Some people think I fly a lot, but I’ve flown less than 3 million miles, and spread across many airlines.

Australia’s Civil Aviation Safety Authority has grounded Tiger Airway‘s domestic flights for a minimum of one week, disrupting thousands of travellers.

Passengers who were due to fly Tiger Airways between 1 July and 9 July 2011 are being offered full refunds or credits for later travel dates.  With school holidays in some Australian states and the effects of intermittent ongoing disruptions due to ash from Chilean volcano Puyehue Cordon-Caulle, some travellers may have difficulty making alternative flights on other airlines.

Tiger Airways international flights to and from Australia, and throughout Asia, are unaffected by the grounding.

Each six months I look at how well connected by air countries are to each other – the Flight Connectivity Index (FCI).  Previous updates – FCI 30 June 2009, FCI 31 December 2009,  FCI 30 June 2010 and FCI 31 December 2011.  Since the last update there has been the usual seasonal changes, Turkey has become more connected while United Arab Emirates has partially reversed it’s ongoing growth in flight connectivity.   The effect of the spring revolutions has been seen with Egypt and Libya both losing some connectivity (5 and 4 countries respectively).

Flight Connectivity Index (FCI)

The Flight Connectivity Index (FCI) value is the number of other countries to which you can fly directly from a given country, based on published schedules of IATA airlines. Domestic flights do not count. To simplify the calculation, countries are defined as members of United Nations, as opposed to using one of the many other country lists available.

With 192 member countries of the UN, the maximum FCI score is 191.  Germany is the country with highest FCI at the moment, at 110 (unchanged from 6 months ago).  Four countries have no flights and FCI score of 0 – these are Andorra, Liechtenstein, Monaco and San Marino.  The average FCI is 23.7, up 0.5 from December 2010 and up 0.03 from a year ago.

More results after the jump.

Read More…

The post outlining all A380 routes and airlines has been updated with many changes.  Apologies for the delay in posting the recent A380 route additions and deletions, including a new airline (Korean).

As there are now more routes and airlines than can easily be shown on a single map, there are now 5 maps covering routes in broad geographic zones.