News and notes from around the interweb:
- A new tool that lets you enter two cities and see the cost of an award across several different programs.
There’s a lot of extraneous stuff in the results, for instance searching DC – Chicago produces prices for Alaska Airline flights as well as lower prices through British Airways if you fly BA’s own aircraft on off-peak dates for the route. And Aeroplan references fuel surcharges (which don’t apply on US domestic flights, or on United which is the airline you’d be flying).
Still, useful and convenient as an alternative to looking up pricing yourself on several different sites.
- 360 virtual reality review of the British Airways Airbus A380 business class product
- Bed bugs.
- I asked on Twitter whether what I was hearing is true, that TSA closes down PreCheck in the American Airlines terminal 8 at New York JFK in the mornings now? It is. TSA doesn’t feel that New York JFK has enough passengers to bother to offer it. So they can sell you PreCheck but it doesn’t mean they have to offer PreCheck.
- Come the end of October Etihad plans to operate their own aircraft instead of Jet Airways planes on San Francisco and New York JFK – Abu Dhabi. The end of those ‘Jetihad’ flights would be a joy to frequent flyers, for sure.
- Reader Dan R. sends a link to the story of Walter Cavanagh, the man who had 1497 credit cards. It turns out I mentioned him a year ago and the 1497 total dates to 2004 or earlier.
I’ve been using Rewardflyer as a tool. I prefer their interface to travel codex
How does BA fly its own aircraft on a US domestic route?
Thanks for the feedback, Elga. I wasn’t familiar with Reward Flyer but will take a look at their interface to see if I can improve. I will say that after a few quick searches it appears that Reward Flyer doesn’t include any discounted short haul awards, nor does it include any results for using Avios.
@Larry – The point Gary made is that there are some awards listed for routes that don’t actually exist. As I explain on the site, the tool is meant to err on the side of caution, and I would rather include more options rather than exclude some possibilities. My tool doesn’t yet account for the fact that BA doesn’t serve those airports, so the BA off-peak award rate is superfluous. (I wouldn’t say erroneous. It would be the correct rate if BA did serve those cities.)
@Scottrick – That’s a surprising response, as booking an award flight using Avios via BA to fly the 611 miles from DCA to ORD is quite likely the cheapest way (or the best way to extract maximum value) for an award booking on that route, as Gary as blogged many times. So including BA awards is anything but superfluous. But just be aware that the flight will be on AA metal.
If only foreign carriers were able to provide competition to US carriers on domestic routes, but I understand that negotiating that right with foreign governments or the EU is currently a non-starter.
@Scottrick – Thanks.
@Larry – No, I meant that including off-peak awards (which can only be used for travel on BA metal) is superfluous. I always intended to provide peak-level awards for travel on partners like AA. However, I have just updated the tool so it should eliminate off-peak awards for most of the world except for travel to/from the UK and for any BA Fifth Freedom routes. Now just the peak-level row will appear if you search DCA-ORD. I’ve already made several major updates this morning so keep the feedback coming!
Great that they’ll still sell you PreCheck. Awfully sweet of them, just in case I wanted to throw my window at them for no good reason.
Pre-Check is a boondoggle. Always has been. (We’ve been pointing that out at TSA News since 2011.) Hilarious that those who ponied up extortion money are now finding out they’re not so special after all.
#Apolcalypse is spelled wrong.