JFC Travel Blog

This year I’ll be in Munich for Oktoberfest from the 28th September - 1st October. I didn’t book the flights until a month ago and as you can probably imagine it was very difficult getting reasonably priced tickets was almost impossible. Even the budget airlines such as easyJet and Air Berlin were charging over £250 at this late stage. KLM was slightly cheaper than this but still well over £200. Surprisingly I managed to book flights on Alitalia for about £165, the drawback is the flight is from Heathrow Terminal 2 and via Milan Malpensa possibly two of the worst airports in Europe. On the plus side it’s more miles for me as Alitalia is part of SkyTeam

It’s been a while since I’ve travelled GNER but I’ve always considered them one of the better train operators in the UK. I missed the news that National Express had been awarded the new franchise in August. The new franchise will start on 9th December 2007.

My main concern for this franchise is that National Express seem to have made the same mistake in bidding for the franchise as GNER, that is they’re paying too high a premium to offer services on this line. GNER were to pay the government £1.3 billion to run the franchise until March 2015, according to the BBC, National Express will be paying £1.4 billion to run the franchise also until March 2015. Therefore National Express are paying more for a shorter franchise as the franchise ends 10 years after GNER was given the renewed franchise rather than 10 years after National Express takes it over.
GNER struggled with these high payments to the government and I can’t see how National Express are going to do any better unless they sacrifice service quality or they raise fares. No doubt if fares rise it’ll be the flexible tickets that suffer the most, one of the things I like about rail travel is its turn up and go nature but these days rail companies are concentrating too much on getting the advance purchase tickets down in price and raising the flexible ticket prices.

The term ‘mileage run’ is often used on frequent flyer sites such as FlyerTalk, a mileage run is when someone books an itinerary for the sole purpose of earning frequent flyer miles, usually to reach a higher level of status in the programme and to gain the associated benefits from this. Some frequent flyer programmes such as Flying Blue also allow you to earn status based on the number of segments flown rather than the total mileage flown. This is the ideal way of earning status for those who regularly fly short haul flights. Every year my travel patterns get me enough segments to reach gold level comfortably but I usually fall a few segments short of reaching platinum. This day trip to Italy was designed to fix that.

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KLM Cityhopper flight KL 1340 from London Heathrow Terminal 4 to Rotterdam. As someone who enjoys flying from London City it may seem a bit odd that I decided to take the KLM flight to Rotterdam from Heathrow rather than taking the numerous VLM flights from London City. The reason was purely for miles, if I was not a member of Flying Blue I would have taken the VLM flight from London City (KLM does not fly to Rotterdam from London City). My Flying Blue gold membership does make Heathrow less of a pain, at least when travelling KLM. (more…)