Lufthansa has announced that they’ll be starting direct flights from London Heathrow to Milan Malpensa from 29th March 2009. The flights are part of Lufthansa’s strategy to get more involved in the Italian market and create another hub at Malpensa airport. (more…)
KLM plan to offer flights from Liverpool to Amsterdam Schiphol from 29th March 2009. Although this route is already served by easyJet, KLM are primarily going after the market of passengers who would like to fly from their local airport and connect to worldwide destinations at Schiphol rather than making the drive or train journey to Heathrow and dealing with the hassles that involves. KLM offer more UK connections to their primary hub than any other airline making it a popular choice for those who live outside of London. However, the south coast of England is not currently served by any KLM services although they do codeshare with Air France out of Southamption.
AZ201 is Alitalia’s second flight of the day to Rome and departs at 06:50. The options for getting to the airport at this time are limited. I aimed to get to the airport before 05:30 to ensure I had enough time to clear security.A few options are available at this time of the morning. The most obvious, a taxi, is also very expensive. National Express dot2dot offers a door to door service for only £16 at the moment (usually £20) for those who live in or near Central London (or staying in a Central London hotel). This would usually be the best option but I was trying to do this trip as cheap as possible. (more…)
It’s usually when things go wrong you realise how bad an airline really is, but a cancellation of a recent Air France flight really raised my opinion of the airline. I had a tight connection and was worried I’d miss the flight from Charles de Gaulle but upon arriving at the airport I discovered the flight was cancelled. So I headed straight to the lounge where they gave me boarding passes to the next flight and because they were unable to provide me an aisle seat in economy I was given an upgrade too. (more…)
This trip was taken shortly before the current election related troubles in Kenya.
Flight KQ 103 departs Heathrow Terminal 4 at 08:15 so I decided to spend the night at the airport Hilton which is attached to Terminal 4 by a walkway so no need to mess around with airport buses in the morning. Check-in at the Hilton was smooth, as a gold member I had been upgraded to the club level and had free access to the lounge which had a selection of complimentary drinks. The lounge was closed the next day in preparation for the Christmas holidays so I was given a voucher in the morning for breakfast. (more…)
It has been announced that Air France KLM has purchased Belgian airline VLM. The airline has the largest number of flights out of London City Airport. Air France KLM started a massive expansion at London City in 2007 through their Irish subsidiary CityJet and VLM will add destinations including Manchester, Rotterdam, Jersey, Brussels and Luxembourg to the AF KLM London City route network.
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 
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.
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…)