JFC Travel Blog

Although I’ve not been generally happy with the way that NXEC has been ‘enhancing’ services since they replaced GNER I still generally have decent experiences on-board. Ultimately, they were all GNER staff at one time!

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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…)

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…)

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…)

CityJet for Air France flight AF 5187 from London City to Nice. Arrived at the airport just before 1pm which was plenty of time before the 14:30 departure. Although I was checked in online I still needed to drop off the luggage (thanks to the rules about liquids meaning I have to check my dangerous contact lens solution in the hold). Dropping the bags off only took a few minutes as there was only one person in the queue. Security was quick, and I was sitting down to lunch less than 15 minutes after arriving at the airport. (more…)

The CityJet for Air France service to Belfast City Airport is operated by ScotAirways  using their Dornier 328 aircraft, the flight is about an hour long.

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As I collect Flying Blue miles I never really considered Eurostar an option until last August, this was the time when airport security took a turn for the worse and for a short while all carryon luggage was banned from UK airports.

As I needed to travel a few days after this ban was in place I decided it was a good time to try Eurostar. Now Eurostar gets most of my business between London and Paris and sometimes Brussels too. Although London City is still not too bad, Heathrow had hit new lows once the new security regulations came into place (and it was a stressful enough experience before these rules came into force). To make things worse, Air France fly from Terminal 2 which has no security fast track for Flying Blue Elite or business class passengers. Eventually it’s planned that all SkyTeam airlines will join KLM in Terminal 4 which will improve things dramatically.

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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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