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.
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Posted by Seth on December 30, 2009 under Trip Reports |
I should be in the air over the Atlantic Ocean right now, curled up in a First Class suite on Turkish Air. Instead I’m on an Airbus A321 over the Mediterranean on a non-stop flight to Barcelona. Indeed, the trip has taken a much more direct routing and quite substantial turn. In the end, I still get to celebrate New Years in Barcelona with the splendiferous missus and we even get to sleep in a real bed tonight rather than in coach on a Delta 767-300ER. Still, the scene today in Istanbul’s airport can only be described as frustrating and trying, with a bit of misery thrown in as well as a reasonably successful tactical retreat.
Last night, while waiting in Luxor for the departure of the flight to Cairo, I learned that the Istanbul-JFK flight for that day had been delayed pretty badly. Over three hours, in fact. That plane was turning around to come back to Istanbul and then would be used for the flight that we were scheduled to be on. Except at the time I didn’t know that it would be that plane, and there was no one in Luxor I could ask. There wasn’t really anyone to ask in Cairo, either. So I went into the flight to Istanbul hopeful and optimistic, as well as truly exhausted.
As first class passengers we were greeted at the end of the jetway with a sign and a golf cart to whisk us away to the security checkpoint and then the lounge. It took them a while to round up the necessary supplies for us to shower but we managed to get that done and settled in for breakfast. Everything seemed OK.
Failure
And then the bottom fell out. The lounge agent came over to me and handed me the house phone. An agent on the other end of the line was explaining that the flight would be rather delayed and that she had arranged for a day room at the hotel in the terminal for us. Ruh roh. Just how delayed would the flight be? At least 3 hours (it turned into 5 by the time we left the airport). That completely ruined our 3 hour connection in JFK. Time to scramble.
There was a flight to Frankfurt leaving in 40 minutes that would get us to the early Frankfurt-JFK flight by the woman could not (or would not) make the change for us. While I tried desperately to negotiate through the language barrier and explain my predicament the minutes ticked away and the flight was closed. That was our last chance to make it to JFK in time for the Delta outbound flight. Game over.
It is also worth mentioning that at this point my laptop decided it didn’t want to power on and my BlackBerry went into a reboot cycle every 5-10 minutes. Ouch.
Recovery, Part 1
The Delta tickets we had were bottom of the barrel priced sale seats. The change fees for them were more than the actual tickets cost. That money was now gone. Poof. Still, I had a mind to celebrate New Years in Barcelona more than I cared about getting the Istanbul – New York flight in Turkish Air first class (a five day vacation is always worth more than an eleven hour flight) so it was time to start making things happen. The lounge had no phones available for customers and there was no means for me to reasonably call the United States to get in touch with Continental, the carrier that issued our tickets. Things were getting worse, not better.
There was a flight leaving for Barcelona in 45 minutes and the agent was willing to put us on that flight, right up until she realized it was a reward ticket. Then she was quite willing to sell us a walk-up full fare ticket and let us deal with our “travel agency” to handle the flights that were missed. Not gonna work. Still, I managed to revive my laptop and get the Skype client working and continental.com’s reward search inventory up on screen. Even more amazing, I actually found two seats available from Barcelona to New York in business class on the date we were scheduled to go home. A glimmer of hope.
Karla answered the phone for Continental and was incredibly patient with me as I explained my needs and desires over a rather questionable voice quality connection. I was able to feed her the flight numbers and she saw the inventory available. She just wasn’t sure if she could change the flight as I had already started the return trip. She had to call a supervisor and in the mean time the 45 minutes to the Barcelona departure were ticking away with great speed. Karla made the necessary changes, inserting an open jaw into the ticket and leaving the Istanbul – Barcelona segment open for us to fill. She was still working on confirming it but we had to go immediately to catch our flight. I gave her my credit card number without knowing the charges and hung up to hop on the plane to Barcelona that was now 30 minutes away from departure.
No can do. The agent was reasonably polite about the situation but it was quite clear. We weren’t getting on that plane. Rebooking the Continental tickets took a bit too long and that flight was closed for sales, even with 30 minutes remaining. I had made the changes that she agreed to and now I was still stuck in Istanbul.
Recovery, Part 2
At this point we had some time to play with. Continental was already reissuing the return ticket so we just had to find a way to get to Barcelona at a reasonable price. There were a number of options, including overnight connections in Amsterdam, Riga and Athens. All were slightly cheaper than the non-stop afternoon flight to Barcelona. In the end, however, we settled on the non-stop flight. Better to go for a relatively sure thing. Besides, we don’t have winter coats with us so Amsterdam or Latvia would be pretty unpleasant tonight.
We booked the flight through Travelocity because is was half the price that the agent wanted in the lounge. Such transactions are normally completed pretty quickly but after 20 minutes we still only had a reservation, not a ticket. Time to make another call. The Travelocity agent initially just wanted me to wait it out. Only when I explained that the flight was 4 hours away did it get properly escalated. Apparently they were worried about fraud for a last minute, one-way ticket purchased from Istanbul to Barcelona. I can’t say that I really blame them. Another 10 minutes on the phone assuring them that I really was me and that I really was buying walk-up tickets and the ticket was finally issued.
The agent had also previously offered us that hotel room for our wait. I now called that one in, asking that we be able to still use it. She agreed and we soon were laying down for a couple hours’ nap time that was much, much needed. Everything seemed OK at this point. We had our flights to Barcelona and the onward flights from Barcelona to NYC, albeit on a somewhat circuitous routing. And we had a bed for the first time in 30 hours. Not all bad. Except one little thing.
Recovery, Part 3
For some reason, Continental couldn’t actually make the change to our reward ticket. The agents I spoke with (and there were several of them) all insisted that we were still checked in for the Turkish Air flight from Istanbul to JFK. As long as we were on that flight they couldn’t remove it from the itinerary and substitute in the three segments to get us home from Barcelona. Time and time again I approached the agents at the counter and asked them to confirm that we were not checked in anymore on that flight. Each time they said we weren’t but the folks at Continental said we were. My worst nightmare at this point was getting to Barcelona and having Turkish reporting us as a no-show for the flight, canceling out the remaining value of our tickets. The price for Istanbul-Barcelona was bad enough. Shelling out for Barcelona-NYC on top of that probably would have driven me over the edge.
I finally had our Turkish Air “handler” from the morning back at the counter so I called Continental one more time with the plan of having the two of them talk it out so I didn’t have to stay in the middle. By coincidence I managed to get Karla on the phone again.
“Karla with a ‘K’?” I inquired. Yes, she said, somewhat befuddled. “I talked to you earlier with the crazy re-route from Barcelona to New York via Brussels and London; remember me?”
I’d like to think that she has fond memories of me now, if for no other reason than I’m pretty sure I was the most entertaining customer she had today. In reality, I’m just really happy that I didn’t have to explain my story one more time. The minutes were now starting to tick away on the afternoon departure to Barcelona and I had already paid for those tickets and I wasn’t about to lose them, too. Fortunately Karla proactively got another supervisor on the phone while I was talking to the agent at the desk. The supervisor apparently has some magic “refresh” button (Karla’s words, not mine) that made the reservation sync up again and show that we were no longer checked in for the flight.
Finally.
Karla then was able to issue the new ticket, collect the $40 additional in taxes and confirm the new flights for us.
Success
And there we were, six hours after the bottom initially fell out, with our flights rebooked and a new itinerary ready to go. Sure, it cost us some cash and the price actually went up as the rebooking process continued. Still, the overall goal was met. We’re going to celebrate New Years among friends in Barcelona and we’re going to experience some fun times on premium cabin flights along the way. The new return flight gives us about four hours at the Virgin Atlantic Clubhouse in Heathrow along with our Upper Class seats across the pond. I’m sure that we’ll be exhausted on Tuesday when we get back to work but overall the adventure remains mostly alive, even if it means no Turkish Air first class. Based on their ground handling I’m not entirely sure it would be worth it.
Lessons learned from this experience:
- Betting on Turkish Air arriving within 3 hours of on-time for the NYC route is a rather large gamble. I lost.
- Creativity and flexibility can find all sorts of reward seats if desperation sets in.
- Sometimes the adventure costs a bit more than expected, but the stories are generally worth it, especially when the rest of the travels are happening on the very cheap side of the ledger.
- A good agent at the airline can really make things happen. Karla did it for me today and others have in the past. They make this whole game run just a bit more smoothly.
Posted by Seth on December 4, 2009 under News |
Yup, Virgin Atlantic seems to be keen on bringing about the apocalypse. They’re actually going to be removing a number of Upper Class seats from their 747-400 configuration and replacing them with coach seats. Even stranger, they’re doing so in the “exclusive” upper deck zone of the 747s. And so there it is – mixing the passengers in the same cabin area on an airplane with no real separation between the two. Even intra-Europe narrow-body planes usually have a curtain or something.
The forward part of the upper deck will still be designated as the snooze zone, reserved for folks who want a quieter ride so they can sleep on the flight rather than eat, drink or chat. But instead of another 10 passengers behind them upstairs there will now be 33 passengers. Sure, there is the small exit row space separating the groups but the only lavatory is in the front (Virgin says they’ll fix that but there doesn’t seem to be room) and tripling the number of passengers is always going to increase the noise level.
But they need to make money and if they aren’t getting it in the old config (left) then they don’t really have too much choice. I guess they could try dropping them down to Premium Economy seats instead. After all, that is supposedly the fasted growing segment of long-haul travel. But they’d probably only get about 16 PE seats in where they are getting 33 coach seats so the incremental gain wouldn’t pan out financially. On the main deck there isn’t much room to work with because of the way the cabin is laid out with the bar and the Premium Economy cabin. Maybe replacing the 14 seats in the nose with coach seats would have worked but that’s more seats lost and you still have the coach passengers mixing with the business class folks.
It turns out that Virgin Atlantic isn’t alone in this type of configuration. Air New Zealand has a similar arrangement on their 747s, though with Premium Economy upstairs, not regular economy. But those two seem to be the only ones.
I know that it doesn’t really matter: people are people and there are plenty of arrogant asshats in the business class seats just like in the coach section. But part of the appeal of buying up to the premium cabin – and especially the upper deck – is the exclusivity of it. And that is going away. Bummer.
Posted by Seth on December 19, 2008 under Uncategorized |
Finally some good news in the world of fees and surcharges! Most major international airlines are cutting them now that fuel costs are dropping back to early 2007 levels.
Recently bmi announced that they were removing fuel surcharges from flights to/from Heathrow, and then they expanded that plan to remove the surcharges on all their regional flights in Europe. The other British carriers have also announced major cuts, with British Airways and Virgin Atlantic both trimming their fees. The amount varies depending on the cabin and trip length, but every little bit helps. Then again, the surcharges don’t seem to be changing for the premium cabins, so maybe it doesn’t help so much.
Most of the major Asian carriers are reducing as well, with ANA, JAL, Asiana and Korean all announcing cuts in the past week or so. The cuts range from 30-70%, which is pretty impressive. That being said, the ANA and JAL cuts are coming down from some ridiculously high levels and they are at the lower end of the range for the cut amounts, so those flights will still have a rather significant surcharge associated with them.
Here’s the thing – we almost certainly won’t see lower fares because of this. The surcharges will decrease but the carriers will almost certainly attempt to raise fares to match the decreases. So why does it matter? In a word, rewards. Reward tickets are subject to “taxes and fees” so they pay for fuel surcharges in most cases. This can render a reward ticket virtually useless for many trips. As the surcharges are traded out and fares raised to compensate folks buying tickets will pay the same price but folks redeeming for a reward trip will see their costs reduced significantly. That’s a great thing.
Posted by Seth on February 24, 2008 under News |
Air travel is often cited as one of the largest contributors to global warming. There is a significant amount of fuel burned on any given flight, and there is also the impact of the contrails (link 1, link 2) and the various auxiliary vehicles associated with air travel (buses, tugs, baggage carts, etc.). Since the odds of a solar-powered commercial airplane are pretty low, looking at other options for lowering the impact of the flight has become a hot topic in the industry.
Sir Richard Branson, President of Virgin Atlantic, has vowed to spend all of the profits from his travel groups searching for ways to reduce the carbon footprint of air travel. A significant step in that direction was taken today, when a Virgin Atlantic 747 flew from London to Amsterdam using biofuels in one of its four fuel tanks rather than Jet A. The hopefully clean fuel is a mixture of coconut and babassu oils. The flight had a number of engineers on board to review the data and check to see if it actually did burn cleaner as well as what the efficiency of the fuel mix is. Burning 10% cleaner but using 20% more doesn’t help so much, it turns out.
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.
