With the unrest/revolution (depending on your viewpoint) currently occurring in Egypt a number of airlines (but far from all) have ceased commercial flights.  Some governments are arranging charter flights for their citizens (and in some cases also for citizens of friendly countries).  In all cases, information is a little difficult to obtain but as best I can tell (from various sources), the following have already arranged some charter flights over upcoming days:

• Australia
• Azerbaijan
• Bahrain
• Belgium
• Canada
• China
• Greece
• India
• Iraq
• Israel
• Japan
• Kuwait
• Qatar
• South Korea
• Thailand
• Turkey
• USA
• Yemen

This list is probably incomplete as the situation is highly changeable.

If you are a visitor to Egypt and wanting to leave, best to first try to contact your embassy, secondly your government through people in your home country, and failing that enquire at the airport.

A number of the evacuation flights are to nearby countries such as Cyprus and Greece.  Accommodation in Larnaca and Athens may be tighter than normal for the next few days.

With Mexicana shut down a few days ago there have been announcements by some airlines of new routes to Mexico and added frequencies.  From the excellent Airline Route blog, we have the following changes made in the past month (since Mexicana started dropping services):

• Aerolineas Argentinas – new route Buenos Aires to Mexico City
• AeroRepublica – new route Bogota to Mexico City
• Air Canada – extra Montreal to Mexico City flights, and new route Vancouver to Mexico City
• Alaska – extra Los Angeles to Mexico City flights
• Avianca – extra Bogota to Mexico City flights
• British Airways – adding codeshares on some American Airlines flights to Mexico
• LAN Peru – extra Lima to Cancun and Lima to Mexico City flights
• United – extra Los Angeles to Mexico City flights
• Virgin America – new routes San Francisco and Los Angeles to Cancun
• Westjet – new route Quebec City to Cancun

Further changes are expected in coming weeks.

A reminder the $14 fee for USA’s visa waiver visa in drag (aka ESTA) kicks in 8 September.  You don’t have to wait for your current ESTA approval to expire to seek another so there is no reason not to apply in the next week for a new approval.  Type in cbp.dhs.gov after the http:// and click on ESTA.

The site was very sluggish when I renewed my ESTA so it might be a good idea not to wait until the last minute in case of problems.

The how to get to series of posts have now been updated for TAM and Aegean joining Star Alliance, Shanghai leaving Star Alliance, Vietnam Airlines and TAROM joining Sky Team.  Apologies for the delay.

Advice has been changed for:

• Bolivia
• Burma (aka Myanmar)
• China
• Vietnam

Some free access availability tools (eg seatcounter.com) have recently stopped working, apparently the old ITN interface is no longer available.  Paid subscription availability tools still work at KVS (some methods are unavailable but decent coverage remains) and Expert Flyer (not affected).

Scott McCartney has a nice summary on the Wall Street Journal of the pros and cons of the airline alliances.  Gary Leff‘s comments on the article focus on United’s starnet blocking.

Translating the global coverage of the alliances into useability for mileage earning and redemption takes care, and to be fair is a big enough topic on it’s own let alone in a summary such as this. Scott touches on some aspects such as the current restrictions on American and British Airways frequent flyer members for flights between USA and UK, the number of destinations served, and the influence the location of primary hubs has on travel useability.

Scott mentions one place where Oneworld is lacking coverage - China.  I think there are other significant holes in the Oneworld network, for example Africa.

The key advice is that choice of airline alliance is relatively important for most frequent flyers, and the single biggest factor in the choice should be based on where you travel (or want to travel).

A new service from Autoslash has great potential to save consumers lots of money on car rental prices.

I had a look at the beta site recently. It looks good, is easy to use and seems to have no problem finding the best rates. I wasn’t able to test the best feature though – like Yapta, Autoslash keeps checking rates and emails you if rates subsequently drop. The service is free and automatic.

Autoslash has worldwide coverage, and indeed happily returned results for Nelson, New Zealand – a small city of 40,000 people.  Smaller towns and places with only independent/local rental cars didn’t work so well.  11 major car rental companies were covered when I checked.  All prices returned are in US$. I’d like to see local currencies as well.

At time of writing this post, the Autoslash web site is still in beta but you can already use it to make bookings and save.

Globe Navigation has some brief info and luscious pictures of every country and some places within most countries. Currently 500 destinations are featured.  The site is very easy to navigate around.

I’ve just spent the past wee while browsing – dreaming of travels to places I haven’t yet been and remembering many journeys I’ve already taken.  Once you’ve picked somewhere to go, my “how to get to” series can help you find affordable ways to travel there.

This is part of a series of blog entries on how to get to countries and places. Here is a link to the index. I plan to eventually cover every country and some other places. If you have a request for a particular country or place please use the Contact link at the top, or leave a comment.

Uganda

Source: Ed Wright

There are bus services from all neighbouring countries to Uganda. Airlines flying to Entebbe, Uganda include:

• Star Alliance – Brussels Airlines, EgyptAir, South African, Turkish
• Oneworld – British Airways
• Sky Team – Kenya, KLM
• Other sSelected – Emirates, Ethiopian

TIP Longhaul travel to/from Uganda most likely requires flying through Europe.  There are relatively few flights intra-Africa and none between Asia and Uganda.

TIP The Oneworld continent-based Explorer around the world fare allows back-tracking through Europe from Uganda as an exception (along with Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria and Tanzania). Only one of the transits through Europe can have a stopover.

TIP For awards, Star Alliance offers the most routing options. However on some programs which limit the number of transfers there may be difficulties due to the lack of flights from any major hubs.

Rick Seaney has a post on understanding airline revenue management. It is a bit US-centric and doesn’t cover all the tools airlines use, but does give some of the main factors behind airline revenue management.

A while ago I posted on the basics of airline revenue management (including the humourous “if airlines sold paint”) as part of my flyer tip series. Surprisingly, there isn’t too much overlap with Rick’s post.