JFC Travel Blog

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.

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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.

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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…)

KLM’s CEO Peter Hartman talks about the inconvenience caused to passengers due to the changes in airport security. As far as I know he’s the first airline CEO to speak out about recent security measures.

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The final leg of the trip to Cairo featured an upgrade to World Business Class on the 747 after a few hassles with airport security. A relaxing end to an interesting couple of weeks.

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My first flight on KLM intercontinental. The flight was relatively short so it was a good candidate to be booked in economy. Managed to reserve seats in row 10 which is a 2-3-2 configuration rather than a 3-3-3 configuration in the rest of the cabin.

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I mentioned a while ago about Air France by CityJet launching new services from London City. Most of these services are now fully operational. However, for reasons I’ve not yet been able to get an answer to the services to Edinburgh, Dundee and Milan Linate are still listed as ‘coming soon’.

UPDATE: Milan Linate has been quietly removed from the list of destinations.

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