Posted by Seth on January 3, 2011 under Trip Reports | 
It is now the new year, with new goals and new milestones on the horizon. But not too late to take a quick look back at 2010 and the travel milestones I hit during the year. Not surprisingly, the more I travel the harder it is to reach new and different accomplishments. Indeed, 2010 had many fewer than 2009, though in a couple categories it surpassed the previous year.
Perhaps the most significant numbers of the year are the total amount of time in the air:
- 151 segments
- 208378 miles
- 18 days 13:31
Those numbers are “butt-in-seat” and based on the distances between the starting and ending airport as calculated on www.openflights.org. They do not include 500 mile minimums or the like. In most cases the durations are based on wheels up to wheels down as tracked by the appropriate authorities, not the block time of the flight or estimates. The 208K miles is the most ever for me in a calendar year as is the 151 segments.
Of the 151 segments flown, more than half (86, to be precise) were routes I had not flown previously. It is certainly becoming more and more difficult to find new ways to get to different places but I continue to try. New lines and new dots are still of value to me and I’m finding that I’m paying a bit more to get them.
I also passed through 77 airports during the year located in 18 different countries. I actually Immigrated 31 different times, including the various times I returned to the United States. On four of my trips there were multiple foreign countries involved.
I visited 15 distinct countries, plus the USA. Eight of those countries (St. Maarten, Sint Martin, Dominican Republic, Ghana, Togo, Guyana, Morocco and Tunisia) were new to me. Two of the crossings (into Togo and back into Ghana were on foot while the Sint Martin/St. Maarten crossing were by car; The others were all by plane. I also added a new state visited – Idaho – to my list even though I drove over from Spokane to get there rather than flying in.
My travels included flying on 24 different airlines (possibly a few more if regional/express carriers are included by I’m not great at tracking those). Of those 24, 13 were airlines I had not previously flown on (AC, AT, BA, BD, BE, HA, LC, RW, SN, TGY, VS, YV & YX). Again, it is getting much harder to find new ones at reasonable prices but I’m doing my best, including a couple booked for the early part of 2011.
None of my milestones north, south, east or west were new extremes for me this year. Nor was my longest flight (SYD-SFO) longer than previous records. I did get a new shortest flight for my list, one that will almost certainly never be broken.
Somewhat amazingly, of the 151 flights I only had three instances where I was struck by operations so irregular that they caused a missed flight. One of them – during my JetBlue AYCJ adventures wasn’t a big deal and I got back on track without really missing anything along the way. Two others – a US Airways delay out of Belgium and a Royal Air Maroc fiasco in Casablanca – caused me to overnight unexpectedly. The US Air incident wasn’t so bad but the Air Maroc one was pretty awful.
Finally, I managed to pick up five new aircraft types during the year. My favorite was probably the smallest, the Cessna 208 Caravan I, though the
| Saab SF340 was fun, too, and the Embraer 175LR was the best ride of them all.
And I got robbed once where the guy took money directly from my hands and probably a couple more times due to bad negotiating skills in markets. At least I robbed the guy who physically took the cash out of my hand back. |
And while I sit on the airplane now, enjoying a flight from Lufthansa into Frankfurt and on to Munich, I realize that I may only be three days into the new year but I’ve already got a new line for my map and tomorrow will bring another one, along with a rubber duckie souvenir. Not a bad way to start the year.
Related Posts:
Tags: Air Canada, bmi, British Airways, Brussels, Dominican Republic, Embraer, FlyBE, Flying, Ghana, Guyana, LoganAir, Lufthansa, Morocco, Togo, Tunisia, Virgin Atlantic
Posted by Seth on November 10, 2010 under frequent flyer, News, points |
Flybe, a regional carrier based in the United Kingdom, has announced that they will be removing all destinations in three countries from their award redemption scheme. All destinations in Spain, Portugal and Croatia will be ineligible for award seats in the Rewards4all program effective March 31, 2011. The carrier has made this move citing high demand for said reward seats:
[O]ver the past few months we have become increasingly aware that the heavy demand for flight redemptions on what is actually just a small number of the routes Flybe operates is putting huge pressure on some of our most popular ’sea and sun’ routes such as those to Spain and Portugal….
[A]s our network evolves over the next few years this situation is unlikely to change.
This move comes on top of the regular inventory restrictions that the airline (and most others) places on award seats and it is a rather uncommon move in the industry. While some airlines may have routes or destinations that are inaccessible via award based on regular inventory controls, in this case Flybe is admitting that they simply aren’t going to bother. If you want to fly to one of those destinations you’ll have to pony up the cash.
Announcing such a change significantly devalues the loyalty program. Most customers collect points to redeem on aspriational trips. These are splurge destinations for a holidays trip that otherwise is unlikely to happen. By choosing to remove access to arguably the most desired destinations in this category the airline is essentially telling its customers to not bother working towards building up that balance because the trip will never happen. Definitely a strange move on the part of their loyalty marketing group.
Posted by Seth on July 5, 2010 under frequent flyer, points, Trip Reports |
So I’m somewhere vaguely south of Greenland right now. I’m sitting at the Upper Class bar of a Virgin Atlantic Airbus A340-300 on the late night flight from London to Newark. This isn’t the flight I originally booked and certainly not the flight I expected to be on tonight but, well, life is funny sometimes.
Still, I’ve taken ten flights in the past eleven days and this one is just fine. The good news is that I can still name all ten of the flights. The itinerary was EWR-LHR//LHR-ABZ-LSI//LSI-KOI-WRY-PPW//WRY-KOI//KOI-EDI//EDI-LHR-EWR.That last bit was supposed to be GLA-EWR but, well, life got in the way so there was a change of plans. It meant an extra flight and it also meant a visit to the Clubhouse and a flight on an extra new airline for me – bmi. Yes, I have over 300,000 points accrued in the bmi Diamond Club frequent flyer program but until today I had never flown with them. And I’m not alone in that aspect of my usage of the program.
In addition to bmi, I also go my first flights on FlyBE, British Airways and LoganAir during the trip. Six new airports, four new airlines and one trip on the world’s shortest commercial flight. Plus some awesome experiences in Scotland. Not bad at all.
Related Posts
Posted by Seth on March 31, 2008 under News |
FlyBE, a British discount airline has an interesting contract with the Norwich airport. Apparently they have to hit certain target numbers of passengers or they pay more for their landing slots and other services in Norwich. In fact, they need to serve 15,000 passengers from each of three cities to get a GBP280,000 (~US$560,000) credit – or avoid a similar charge. And they need to hit that target by today. They’d already well surpassed 15K passengers on two routes, and they had 14,828 on the route between Norwich and Dublin. With 172 passengers needed to make up the difference they did what any reasonable person would do – they paid them. The airline went out and offered to pay a bunch of folks to fly back and forth, for about 30-40 Pounds each, in order to get their passenger numbers over the threshold. On top of being paid to fly back and forth, the “passengers” are being offered open bar on the flight. That should end well.
Of course the folks at the Norwich airport authority are unhappy about the prospect of not getting the money back, and they are now claiming that the paid passengers should be considered as employees and therefore not count towards the 15K target. I tend to agree with the airport in this case.
With a little bit of foresight from the revenue management group it wouldn’t have been too hard to offer up a 1 Euro fare and get a bunch of people to bite. But with the short time frame that FlyBE had to deal with, that was no longer viable. If they end up losing the 280K GBP over this it is going to be one very expensive mistake.
