Connecting flight options , pros and cons

Murphy_The_Cat

SW17 wrote: »

Don't know about very poor (but then I fly from London usually ), but it was certainly made more expensive from the regions when BA stopped giving free domestic connections last year. It depends to some extent on how much you pay to acquire your Avios, some people have them coming out their ears from clever use of Tesco, credit cards etc. They can still represent good value on short haul fares.

I had a quick mooch at the 'how many avios, to go where' website and the choice seemed (very) small and needed a lot of avios to get them.

An earlier suggestion from caz3121 prompted be to think a bit more laterally and I've now got an option d) which looks very attractive.

DUB-LHR-DFW on an AA777-300ER (luverly, luverly), overnight in DFF, then DFW - HNL on a AA 767-300 with International Bus class and flat bed seats.
The cons are that the journey would take longer (not an issues as I'd set off a day earlier).
The pros are that I'd be 'proper' Bus Class all the way, the journey would have a break, so no aggro with Customes/Immigration/Connections and we'd get a proper nights sleep in a proper bed.

I'm looking at making this as enjoyable a clebratory trip for my family as possible - and breaking it for an overnight, rather than getting there as quickly as possible would work well.

Plus, its the same price as the other options.

pollypenny

Oh, Murphy, this sounds sooooo complicated! I just want direct now. Mi am thinking that AA Advantage is going to be better for us than our BA Avios, since Manchester to Philly is our usual route.

Murphy_The_Cat

pollypenny wrote: »

Oh, Murphy, this sounds sooooo complicated! I just want direct now. Mi am thinking that AA Advantage is going to be better for us than our BA Avios, since Manchester to Philly is our usual route.

This could be my only opportunity to take my family Bus class to Hawaii (& back through the US) & I'm keen to make it as enjoyable as possible. Hopefully it won't be to complicated :beer:
Its going to realistically take more than 24 hours to get there and I wouldn't want to spend a couple of days absolutely cabbaged.

Now that Philly is served directly by AA from MAN, I'd be taking the AAdvanatge miles as well.

camking

What did you end up doing?

I guess you're tied to BA/AA for the rewards?

Check for split tickets - you may be able to save a lot by doing a return from Dublin to, e.g. New York, plus a New York to Honolulu, especially in premium cabins. I've had considerable success with that approach recently (the two tickets together cost less than one third of the single ticket price!)

If time is more important, at certain times, you can get there in under 22 hours (e.g. United; in BusinessFirst & First; Dublin -> Newark -> San Francisco -> Honolulu); three flights of around 6hr each; cash price c.2K pp inc. taxes very reasonable (IMHO)) So there are other options, depending on your priorities.

If you are travelling business, or higher :j, you won't have to wait as long for your baggage reclaim at your port of entry, as your baggage will almost always have priority and come out first anyway. Not only does that mean less waiting, but you get into the immigration and customs queues in front of the economy-class people. Allowing 4 hours for this would allow for lengthy delays and very long queues - depends on your attitude to delay risk. Usually for me, I'm through customs within an hour of touching down. (Once, in a kind of perfect storm, I managed to be in my Newark airport hotel room just 59 minutes after touchdown!)

Although internal flights in the USA are usually no-frills, with some airlines, trans-continental routes are treated more like an international flight, which is important when it comes to food and seats - check with the airlines. This can make it preferable to route via an east coast city and a west coast city, instead of a more central city (e.g. Chicago, Houston, Dallas, Minneapolis)

I've considered flying London to the USA via Dublin in order to clear immigration at Dublin, and I guess that there would be shorter queues there, although I read that the lounges are before immigration, so you might not get as much chance to enjoy the lounge facilities?

However, it depends which terminals at which airports you would enter the USA - a lot of it is machine-based now and fairly quick anyway in my experience, especially if you've entered the USA before using an ESTA, although again, entirely airport-dependent. I've had good experiences at LA, Chicago, Newark, Washington DC (LAX, ORD, EWR, IAD); terrible at Atlanta. Customs is generally a case of handing the slip of paper to the official as you walk past.

Murphy_The_Cat

camking wrote: »

What did you end up doing?

I guess you're tied to BA/AA for the rewards?

hello camking

the dates that I'm looking for for 2017 haven't been released yet, so its all currently a research exercise (they should be appearing in about a month or so).
My preference would be AA/BA but its not set in stone - I'm hopeful that the AA/BA sale in Decemeber will come up with the goods.

As a backup plan, I'm also pricing up economy, with the possibility of using some of my AA miles to upgrade to BUS class if the seat sale doesn't work for me.

dickydonkin

camking wrote: »

If you are travelling business, or higher :j, you won't have to wait as long for your baggage reclaim at your port of entry, as your baggage will almost always have priority and come out first anyway. Not only does that mean less waiting, but you get into the immigration and customs queues in front of the economy-class people.

Priority tags are pretty meaningless most of the time - particularly on a multi-sector journey and in particular, if flying BA.

As for getting to the immigration desks before economy passengers, this would be virtue of (generally) being allowed to disembark the aircraft first - not by reclaiming 'priority' baggage as you cannot reclaim baggage until you have been processed/cleared by immigration.

richardw

Btw AA is slowly introducing Premium Economy, but you can't yet select this in the travel class menu on their website, select economy and then if available the premium economy seat will show up on the seat map in front of main cabin extra at an extra cost.

Murphy_The_Cat

richardw wrote: »

Btw AA is slowly introducing Premium Economy, but you can't yet select this in the travel class menu on their website, select economy and then if available the premium economy seat will show up on the seat map in front of main cabin extra at an extra cost.

Its going to be a long and very slow process as they introduce PE onto the AA planes (I think that their new Dreamliners are getting it and then retrofitting other selected planes over a period).
We travelled MCE from LAX to LHR on an AA 777-300ER which made the long leg much more pleasant than being in economy (the upgrade was £86 PP for a 10 hour flight, which I think is good value.)
For us, its the extra legroom that makes the difference, the other feature of PE (extra baggage, larger/better meal choice, earlier boarding wouldn't really have an extra value for us). But I can appreciate that for other people, PE would be a very attractive option.