Which airline to Vegas

wdyw

If you want to go Jan - April, then Mytravel is not an option - unless they change their schedule dramatically from this year. Also, I'd avoid them if you plan to book months in advance. They are a great budget option if you leave it to the last minute, but if you are paying their brochure price you might as well fly with Virgin or KLM.

wouldn't it be nice to be flexible enought to fly out this weekend. £164 for 14 nights with car hire thrown in!

Murphy_The_Cat

wdyw wrote:

If you fly from london, its hard to beat the direct route with Virgin. with the Manchester option, don't discount the Airtours/Mytravel twice weekly flights unless you are over 6'. Someone mentioned Mytravel has a seat pitch of 29'', but I don't believe that to be the case with the trans-atlanntic plights.

Hi wdyw

It was me that mentioned the 29" seat pitch on another thread

It's not from personal experience (I wouldn't fly charter again without a very good reason) it was taken from several online resources including airlinequality.co.uk and other flyers forums. If you google mytravel seat pitch you'll get a good sample of views (quite a few of which are positive).

MTC

wdyw

In case I had my flights mixed up I just asked the OH what she thought of the seat pitch, and at 5'6'' her opinion was "quite roomy". Not on a par with American Airlines but suffice for us. I hope they haven't reconfigured as we are going to use them in a couple of weeks time! I'll report back.

Murphy_The_Cat

wdyw wrote:

In case I had my flights mixed up I just asked the OH what she thought of the seat pitch, and at 5'6'' her opinion was "quite roomy". Not on a par with American Airlines but suffice for us. I hope they haven't reconfigured as we are going to use them in a couple of weeks time! I'll report back.

I found this link which tells you a little bit more about Mytravel charter flights.

I truly hope that you don't get a 29" seat pitch as I would be climbing up the side of the plane (I'm a big bloke, hence my comment about flying on charters).

MTC

wdyw

yeah, I had a look at the airlinequality.co.uk website which says 29. I did find another one that said 28 for short haul and 29-30 for long haul. 30 is suffice (for us and if we did have 29 last time it was ok also) and only 1 inch less than Virgin. I don't think I'll go as far as bringing an inch tape with me though!

When we fly to the east coast we always use American Airlines. Now their seat pitch is something else!

When you said you didn't like charters I took it to mean on other grounds rather than seat pitch. There are still a lot of people who distrust charter flights, even though since deregualtion in the 80's there is very little to differentiate between scheduled and non-scheduled anymore.

Murphy_The_Cat

wdyw wrote:

When you said you didn't like charters I took it to mean on other grounds rather than seat pitch. There are still a lot of people who distrust charter flights, even though since deregualtion in the 80's there is very little to differentiate between scheduled and non-scheduled anymore.

Hi wdyw

seat pitch is a major factor for me, but I also don't like the other nasty tricks that the charter companies do to bump up the price - including charging extra to sit together, extra for food, extra for pre booking seats, extra for credit cards, extra for your baggage (by only giving you a minging baggage allowance) etc etc to bump up an initially well priced ticket.

Some folks take the view that if its a charter, it must be a lot cheaper, but this is often not the case. I'm doing a Man - Tampa, Miami - Man trip in November this year and AA is over £500 cheaper than First Choice. But it's not just the price, they also offer (as you know because you're a AA user), a generous baggage allowance, pre assigned seating, meals in flight and in our case, much, much more convienient flights.

In the past I have had the flights out and back really take the shine off my holiday because I've been packed into a plane like a veal calf.

Never again.

MTC

p.s. First Choice long haul are very generous on the seat pitch.

debtfreelondon

Thing you have to bear in mind flying to the US is that if you connect in a US city you will have to disembark, go through immigration, pick up your bags, go through customs, drop off your bags, get to the domestic terminal and reboard.

The only time I've done this (and the last time I'll do it) we barely made the flight after transferring in Philadelphia for a Washington DC flight - and that involved us running through the airport with our shoes off !!

Don't underestimate the amount of time it takes to be processed through immigration and stand in line with the rest of the USA getting back into the domestic terminal. I understand that with the changes to immigration that the queues are even longer now as they take fingerprints and retina scans.

The cheapest flights usually have the worst connections. Make sure you have plenty of time between flights.

And on the note of KLM/Northwest - we flew KLM from Manchester via Amsterdam to San Francisco last November and it was the worst flight of my life. No seat back tv, same entertainment coming back as going, service slow. The longest trip in my life - 22 hours with stopovers. Check what aircraft you're on before you go.

UnitedFlyer

debtfreelondon wrote:

Thing you have to bear in mind flying to the US is that if you connect in a US city you will have to disembark, go through immigration, pick up your bags, go through customs, drop off your bags, get to the domestic terminal and reboard......

The only time I've done this (and the last time I'll do it) we barely made the flight after transferring in Philadelphia for a Washington DC flight - and that involved us running through the airport with our shoes off !! .

This is very true!!!
I once managed to grab a cheap flight (Manchester - Vegas) with American Airlines.
Nothing bad to say about them, but by the time we got off the plane (connecting in Chicago), and went through immigration, got to the other terminal, I had missed the flight. Flight after had 2 seats left, but were filled with other passengers, same again for flight after, but got the on after that. Finally landed in Vegas about 1:00am.

Now however .... I stick with just 1 airline.
This give me "status" on their frequent flier program.
I get to sit at the front of the plane (Business Class sometimes), get priority check in (so no long queues), priority boarding, priority security lines in US (this can save 40 odd minutes) and free upgrades domestic.

I've never had a problem with any connection now. One was only 49 minutes as well and I made it!

So ... if you do fly to USA frequently, sign up for the FF program and stick to that airline!

Murphy_The_Cat

UnitedFlyer wrote:

This is very true!!!
I once managed to grab a cheap flight (Manchester - Vegas) with American Airlines.
Nothing bad to say about them, but by the time we got off the plane (connecting in Chicago), and went through immigration, got to the other terminal, I had missed the flight. Flight after had 2 seats left, but were filled with other passengers, same again for flight after, but got the on after that. Finally landed in Vegas about 1:00am.

Now however .... I stick with just 1 airline.
This give me "status" on their frequent flier program.
I get to sit at the front of the plane (Business Class sometimes), get priority check in (so no long queues), priority boarding, priority security lines in US (this can save 40 odd minutes) and free upgrades domestic.

I've never had a problem with any connection now. One was only 49 minutes as well and I made it!

So ... if you do fly to USA frequently, sign up for the FF program and stick to that airline!

I can't guess which airline you always use

Good advice about the frequent flyer sign up, I'm only a little bit away from a free flight to America with my airline of choice - AA.

MTC

lancsman_2

Have you looked at options via Dublin ? At least your'e flying in the right direction

About 7 or 8 years ago we flew to Chicago via Dublin from Manchester. At that time we cleared US immigration at Dublin Airport. Do they still do that, saves loads of time.

D