Airlines Deals

The flight
British Airways (0870 850 9850; www.ba.com) took on the low-cost airlines with ferocity last week by increasing the number of seats available on its low-cost flights into Europe by 500 per cent. Two million more tickets, priced from £29 one-way will be available year-round, and prices on dozens of routes have been dropped by up to 50 per cent. Amsterdam, Barcelona, Geneva, Madrid and Toulouse now have fares from £29 each way, and Naples, Pisa, Verona and Varna start at £34. Further flung destinations, including Izmir, Dubrovnik and Thessaloniki, begin at £44 one-way.

The rip-off

A nice selection of ham sandwiches, some pickled eggs, a flask of squash and a tupperware box of sausage rolls used to constitute a feast of a picnic. But now the classic summer meal has been taken to a ridiculous level of extravagance by chef Craig Sherrington of Lake Windemere’s Storrs Hall Hotel (www.elh.co.uk) After finding the perfect spot in the hotel’s 17 acres of gardens, guests can wait for their hamper of foie gras, beluga caviar, British rare white beef, Scottish lobster and fruit trifle with gold-leaf shavings, plus bottles of Cristal Champagne and Chateau Lafite-Rothschild to be delivered. The price? A mere £1,567 for two people.

The product

Casio has a new watch which it hopes will become the serious walker’s best friend. The Pro Trek PRG-60 is solar-powered, has a built in barometer so you can track upcoming weather, altimeter, thermometer and digital compass. It costs £239.99. Call 020 8208 7813 for stockists; www.casio.co.uk

The book

Rather than stuff your suitcase with all those paperbacks you’ve been meaning to read all year, you can now download more than 10,000 titles from www.audible.co.uk Biographies, classics, children’s books and more can be bought individually in abridged and unabridged versions which can be burnt to CD or played on music players. Or a year’s membership including two titles a month and an iPod Shuffle costs £14.99 a month.

The airport

A new wellbeing club has opened in the departure lounge of Heathrow’s terminal one. Rejuve (020 7958 1718; www.rejuve.info) includes an exercise area, eight treatment rooms offering revitalising massages, a barber and nutrition area selling juices and salads. A day’s membership costs £25.

The luxury retreat

Pencalenick, a luxury self-catering property in the Cornish town of Fowey is now available as a holiday rental, and couldn’t be further from the traditional country cottage in appearance … and price.

The stunning house has a seeded grass roof, timber frame and is constructed from glass and steel to appreciate the natural light and uninterrupted seaviews. Up to 16 guests can stay, and the use of a 40ft classic motor boat with skipper, plus an in-house chef are included in the £2,000-a-day price tag. Contact 020 7747 6858; www.pencalenickhouse.com

The website

Over half of Britons take a UK holiday each year, but the founders of The Real Visitors Book are peeved at the lack of advice about them compared with foreign breaks. They are calling for holidaymakers to write holiday reviews for their website, www.therealvisitorsbook.co.uk

Comments(0)

FOR decades, the budget traveller in Europe accepted that the necessary but painful core of the experience was covering the distance between the glittering capitals either wedged in the seat of a bus designed for tiny people, crawling through the industrial district of some hell-hole at 3am, or sharing a Kombi with a Dutch hippie named Wim with a theory about Frank Zappa and the moon landings.

But that’s all changed in the past 10 years. The cheap-flight revolution began in the late 1990s and now the continent is crisscrossed with every conceivable route, from the big capitals to disused military airports put back into service. With proper planning you can save hundreds of dollars on a holiday, but it takes a bit of work and lateral thinking.
1. Set aside a few hours for research: There are about a dozen notable cheap airlines and a range of more obscure ones, and the best way to get a good deal (if you are a little flexible about destination and date) is to compare as many as possible and try a few route combinations with different airlines. This is best done manually, website by website. There are several websites that purport to find the cheapest available flights but they’re rarely completely up to date (prices can change within a day), and they often don’t include the smaller airlines.

The largest of the cheap airlines is Irish carrier Ryanair, with a network centred on London, Dublin, Barcelona and Berlin. It is aggressively trying to cement its leading position, building customer loyalty by offering free flights – that is, for one €cent, plus about €10 ($17) in taxes.

Second largest is Easyjet, the company that really kick-started the low-cost flight revolution, but it certainly isn’t the cheapest player on the market. Other carriers have their specialties – Skyeurope, for example, is centred on Bratislava, the otherwise dispensable capital of Slovakia, and great for southeastern Europe. Wizzair specialises in Poland and surrounds. BMI Baby flies from regional British cities to Europe and has no flights out of London except for a few British Airways services.

2. Be thorough: There are many valid reasons why a really cheap flight could be lurking amid a range of more expensive ones. A carrier may be offering a destination at, say, €60 including taxes for 12 or 13 days and, right in the middle, there’s one for €5. Why? Who knows? Maybe there was a one-way charter booked. Maybe it’s a plane that has to be rerouted to get the schedule back in kilter. Keep various websites open in multiple windows, and jump from site to site. It’s worthwhile keeping notes as you go to avoid getting lost in a variety of options.

Two carriers that save research time by having an automatic lowest-fare search function are Jet2 and Thomsonfly. Unfortunately, most of their flights leave from Leeds or Sheffield, respectively. The others make you trawl, presumably in the hope you’ll tire and book a mid-price fare.

3. Be flexible with dates and cities: The cheapest flights are at least a couple of weeks out and usually, but not always, in the early morning. Be flexible about destinations, too: many such flights are cheap because they are going to underused airports, and it’s worth looking at the cities close to where you want to go and considering nearby alternatives.

If you can find a cheap flight from London to Madrid, for example, well, congratulations, you don’t need to read any further, but otherwise you might try flying into Santander (in the north of Spain) or Valladolid. Never heard of either? No matter: they are a two-hour or three-hour train ride or drive from Madrid, and flights there from Britain should be at rock-bottom prices.

The alternative gateway strategy is particularly useful in countries with multiple destinations and cheap local transport, such as Portugal and Poland.

You can even fly into one country to get to another – for instance, the best way into Andalusia in Spain might be to take a flight to the Portuguese city of Faro, where a bus ticket or car rental to Seville will be much cheaper than flying direct.

But beware the idiosyncrasies of local transport networks. It’s easy to be too clever by half and arrive in Szczecin just after the departure of the twice-weekly train to Warsaw.

4. Make careful note of where the airports actually are: Many airports are only nominally in the city listed as their destination. Flying to Grenoble gets you to Lyons and a shuttle bus. The classic is Frankfurt, as what you’re actually flying into is an airport called Frankfurt (Hahn), a couple of hundred kilometres from the city, with a half-dozen cities closer to it than the one after which it is named. Factoring in the cost of getting to the airport is crucial: it may well be more expensive than the actual flight.

5. Be careful booking multiple-leg journeys: The low-cost airlines are point-to-point, which means that even if you’re connecting via the same airline, it won’t automatically rebook a flight you missed because an earlier one was late. This is particularly important in winter when fog in Europe’s north can delay takeoff by hours. Most airlines will rebook at a cost – as much as pound £40 ($100) – that could be more than the actual ticket.

Ideally, aim to arrive in the early morning and leave late afternoon from the same airport (landing in Stansted and taking off from Gatwick is to be avoided at all costs), thus saving the cost of a hotel.

6. Book return flights well ahead: It’s easy to grab a cheap outward flight, forget to book a return and suddenly realise the only flights available have skyrocketed to full commercial prices. One solution, if your return date isn’t all that definite, is to book multiple return flights. It may seem crazy but it’s cheaper to book flights costing €15 out on, say, three consecutive Tuesday mornings six weeks ahead, rather than waiting until two days before you go and then paying €150. (Of course, you won’t be refunded for unused seats.)

Once you get over the weirdness of booking flights as if you were betting on a roulette table, you’ll see it makes sense.

7. Be lateral: It might be cheaper and quicker to fly in a V-shape than to take a train between two destinations. It may well be easier to get from Esbjerg in Denmark to Gothenburg in Sweden – and who among us hasn’t needed to – by flying into and out of Geneva (on different carriers) than it would be to take the two trains necessary to get there.

8. Be open-minded: One of the best things about the cheap-flight era is that it has opened up cities we might otherwise never have considered. Be willing to take pot luck and go where the cheap fares lead you. Who knew that the Pyrenees city of Pau would be such a mysterious border town? Or how about Lubeck in Germany, the city that invented marzipan and seems to run on it still? But don’t feel too much like a carefree jetsetter: Ryanair has introduced a policy of charging extra for non-cabin luggage and other carriers are likely to follow.

Comments(0)

On their face, the numbers are stunning, especially since Greensboro is not near the North Pole or the tropics. Piedmont Triad International Airport is surpassed only by five airports, including those in Alaska and Hawaii, as places where airfares increased by the biggest percentage from 1995-2006.

And in the past year, Greensboro saw the second-largest percentage increase of airfares in the nation between the first quarter of 2005 and the first quarter of 2006, according to a recent federal study of airfares.

But don’t let the numbers fool you: plenty of airports, like Roanoke for example, have higher fares, say people who prepare and interpret the figures.

“The fact that you lost … low-cost airlines and have zero today is your big problem,” said Tom Parsons, the founder of www.bestfares.com, an Internet travel site. “Other airports probably have worse airfares than you but because they never had the low-cost airlines in the first place, yours just shows very very high.”

Beginning in 1994, when Continental Airlines established a hub here that offered “peanuts fares,” prices dropped at PTI and passenger boardings soared to nearly double what they are today.

That drew AirTran, another discounter. Despite the fact that Continental dropped the hub in 1996, AirTran — and, later, Independence Air — helped keep fares low.

In late 2004, AirTran dropped service to PTI. A year later, Independence went out of business.

What’s left are the traditional airlines with fewer discounts, including United, Delta and US Airways.

At airports like Raleigh-Durham International, where Southwest Airlines offers consistent discounts, the other carriers must keep prices lower to compete. Here, they’re not facing the same competition. On top of that, those carriers have raised fares 19 times since January 2005, Parsons said.

“Raleigh has experienced fare hikes too,” Parsons said, “but those fares only stick where there is no competition from low-fare carriers.”

Passengers who fly out of PTI, then, are keeping prices low for other airports by paying higher fares here.

“You’re one of those airports, what we call a small regional airport, that subsidizes the rest of the USA,” Parsons said.

The overall increase here happened despite US Airways’ strategy to lower fares on many flights out of PTI in February.

PTI’s staff and board meet with the airlines often.

“We’re very mindful of the fact that fares are important to people,” said Henry Isaacson, chairman of the Piedmont Triad Airport Authority. “They’re important to us and we are ever vigilant about that and we do what we can.

“The airlines will do what they want to do in the final analysis. But we put a lot of pressure on them to keep their fares competitive and stay somewhat in line with our sister airports.”

The lack of competition is even worse in Anchorage, said Parsons. And Hawaii’s prices are high because it’s such a popular tourist destination, said Steve Anderson, a transportation specialist at the U.S. Bureau of Transportation Statistics, who prepared the fare surveys.

Comments(0)

Istanbul is set to be the next big weekend break destination with the launch of the first Easyjet flights there on Tuesday. The city will be the airline’s third destination outside the European Union - flights to Marrakesh, and Split and Rijeka in Croatia were launched this summer.
The move is part of a growing trend for low-cost airlines to expand their networks outside the EU. Thomsonfly is to add Marrakesh to its timetable in November, and last week Ryanair announced it would also fly to Marrakesh and Fez, plus the Croatian town of Pula in October.

Samantha Day, Easyjet’s public relations manager, said: ‘Historically, low-cost airlines have only expanded in the EU because it’s a lot simpler, as the countries share the same regulations and legislation. But people are getting more adventurous and the potential of places like Istanbul make the added complications worth it.’

The Easyjet flights from Luton cost from £61 return on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays until September, when they will become daily. ‘It’s the only city that embraces two continents so is very attractive as a city break, and will also act as a gateway to a coast which is very popular for holidaymakers and second-home owners,’ said Day.

Aside from the historical sites such as the Blue Mosque and Topkapi Palace, and the bellydancing, bazaars and kebabs, the Turkish tourist board is keen to promote Istanbul’s modern cultural scene. It now has its own Time Out guide, a new Ritz Carlton hotel, and nightclubs, bars and designer clothes shops to rival any western city.

Jamie Dunford Wood, managing director of Travel Intelligence, which offers high-end hotels around the world, said: ‘Boutique hotels first established themselves in Istanbul in 2003. Today, the most chic is the 18-room Sumahan on the Water. It is one step ahead of the game by being in a peaceful location on the shores of the Bosporus slightly away from the city centre.’

Comments(0)

An Alliance Air flight from Kolkata to Silchar returned to the airport soon after take off due to a false fire alarm on Saturday.

The ATR-42 plane of Alliance Air, a subsidiary of the Indian airlines, took off at 10.30 am but had to return when a fire indication was noticed, a spokesman of the Indian said.

The aircraft landed at the NSC Bose International Airport with 37 passengers at 10.40 am amidst the emergency drill.

However, after check up, the alarm was found to be false, the spokesman said adding all the passengers were safe.

The incident delayed the flight by about 2.30 hours.

Comments(0)

Airbus achieved deliveries of 219 over the first six months of 2006, of which 170 were A320- family and 49 wide bodies.

Airbus Also accumulated orders for 117 aircraft, whereby it secured orders for 96 Airbus A320 family aircraft, the largest of which came from Indian Airlines which sealed an agreement for 43. The remaining 21 orders for widebody types comprise five A330s, three A340-300s and 13 A350s.

Comments(0)

In 1991, when Kerala Police won football’s Federation Cup, it was the first time in the country’s sporting history that an institutional team was winning respective Federation Cups in volleyball and basketball too. With the cream of Kerala’s sportsmen turning out in their chosen disciplines, it was high noon for the state police force.

Today, many members of the 1986 Seoul Asian Games bronze-winning volleyball team are happily serving as policemen. There is Abdul Razzaq, Uday Kumar, Cryrill Vallor and player-manager S Gopinath. Gopinath, incidentally, is the highest-ranked sportsman in Kerala Police - he is superintendent of police in Kollam district.

Alternately, the country’s biggest employers of sportspersons, the Railways, too was teeming with international-level sportspersons - mainly athletes - from Kerala.

Recalls PT Usha at her home at Payyoli: “My decision to join the Railways was based on the fact that their office was in Calicut, which was close to my home, whereas Indian Airlines operated only out of Ernakulam.

“As for picking a job, that was the sole criteria. Today it has changed. The Railways office has shifted further away to Pallakkad while Airlines have extended operations to Calicut.”

The 80s saw a number of athletes like Padmini Thomas, MD Valsamma, who hailed from remote areas, making waves. None of these athletes’ family members were involved in sport. VP Sathyan’s father Gopalan Nair retired from Kerala Police, but had little inkling or interest in his son’s footballing activities. How did these handful of athletes manage to get to the top? “Sheer hard work and commitment,” says Shiny Wilson, ace middle distance runner and a prime member of the ‘golden generation’.

“I never had an aim in the beginning but after the achievements at the national level, I dreamt of bringing laurels for the country. Medals alone motivated us,” says Shiny in Chennai, where she is currently based with her swimmer-husband Wilson Cherian.

The procurement of a department job back then was the accepted norm, but it was not the sole motivating factor. “I was only interested in running,” says Usha. “The job was just an assurance for the future.”

“As kids we had to travel miles to reach our school. Instead of walking I began running to the school and back,” recalls Shiny. “Slowly, running became a thrill as I always wanted to beat the boys who competed with me.

“I also started to compete in the school, where I finished first. The small prizes spurred me on.”

Today the trend, according to the athlete, has changed. There is a bigger rush to gain entry into the department teams as it ensures a rosy future. Sportspersons usually hail from the lower-economic groups and after finding a cushy job, the bigger picture is conveniently forgotten.

Shiny says the socio-economic scenario has changed over the years and that has had an impact on sport. ‘’There’s more money from the Gulf. People are more concerned about their kids taking up studies. They consider sports a wastage of time and energy. We cannot blame them. There are a number of athletes here who find it difficult to make both ends meet.

“Very few are taking up sports despite the vastly-improved facilities,” says Shiny, “Among those who do, the boys are choosing cricket. And the girls are all glued to the TV sets.”

“There is always a job for the medium-level sportsman in Kerala,” opines Sharaf Ali. “Holding on to an excellent sportsman is the real challenge for these departments and the state. Perhaps that is why one sees the demise of institutional teams in Kerala.”

Part of this flight, even if seems far and few between, has to do with regularising promotions in the departments. “For us, getting a job is hardly the end of the story. We know what problems we face once we are in a job, and when the time comes for promotions and increments, especially once our careers are over,” says Usha.

“There will always be heartburn for the regular employee when a sportsman is promoted out of turn. But that is the whole truth. How else would a sportsman’s worth be realised, especially when he can’t perform on the international stage anymore?” argues Sharaf Ali.

The general feeling is that occasional cash rewards by the state and Central governments are welcome, but in the longer run, they paint a wrong picture. It is almost as dole, not meant to last long.

Today, Shiny, like Valsamma, is on deputation from the Railways with Food Corporation of India, one of the few all-India departments still sticking to their sports policy, albeit with little results.

Usha chose to chart her own path by forming the Usha School of Athletics in 2002. With an outlay of Rs 89 lakhs, things after four years appear to be slowly taking shape. But there is fresh trouble on the horizon. After her girls repeatedly won the Kozhikode sub-junior championships, rival schools protested that Usha’s wards were too good to be competing at this level and should be debarred.

“Now, this,” reacts Usha incredulously. “My girls are only 14 and 15 years old, why stop them from running,” she asks.

In another time, this would have implied great flattery, but for the ordinary athlete in the dusk of her career, this is a new challenge. Usha, you have to keep running.

After all, you chose it.

Comments(0)

Praful Patel, Union minister of state for civil aviation today announced that the UPA government is going to set up the base for maintenance of the entire fleet of Indian Airlines’ A-319 airbuses. He was speaking at the inaugural function of the NSC Bose airport-Dum Dum Cantonment railway link.

The link was inaugurated by the Union minister for railways, Lalu Prasad Yadav. Several state leaders, including minister for sports and transport, Subhas Chakrabarty, minister for self-help groups, Rekha Goswami, chairman of the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Railways, Basudev Acharya, attended the function. MPs Amitava Nandy, Taritbaran Topdar, Ajay Chakrabarty were also present on the occasion.

NSC Bose Airport at Dum Dum is the first airport in India to have railway connectivity. ‘‘We plan to introduce railway connections at airports in Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai, Hyderabad and Bangalore,’’ Patel said.

The Union minister said that modernisation of the six metro airports have to be completed before 2009 as India is going to host the Commonwealth Games in 2010. ‘‘A foreigner gets the first impression of a country from its airport. To make sure that we don’t cut a sorry figure at the first sight itself, the airports have to be revamped,’’ the minister said.

Patel added that Cooch Behar was going to be one of the 35 non-metro airports which the Union government plans to upgrade and modernise. The project requires an investment of around Rs 10,000 crore and will be completed by 2008.

‘‘While we are modernising the metro-airports we have also decided to revamp the non-metro airports. Talks are on, regarding Cooch Behar and we’ve requested the state government to come up with more suggestions for modernisation,’’ Patel said.

According to Patel, the government will not stop at modernising only 35 airports. ‘‘There are several non-metro airports that we plan to upgrade,’’ he said.

Comments(0)

The Civil Aviation Ministry today ruled out any immediate possibility of floating the IPO for Air India, saying its first priority was to successfully merge the foreign carrier with Indian Airlines.

‘’The IPO can come later. This is not the best time to enter the market,'’ Civil Aviation Minister Praful Patel told newspersons after inauguration of the country’s first multi-modal transport system at Netaji Subhash international airport here.

Patel said his ministry’s first priority was the merger of Air India and Indian Airlines. ‘’This is because we need bigger and stronger carriers. Over the last two years, there has been 50 per cent increase in traffic than that over the past 50 years.'’

Stating that the merger would enable the two strong carriers to leverage their strengths, he said the synergie would provide a strong entity for Air India. ‘’We need a strong entity before we can go to the market.'’

In reply to a question, Patel said that his Ministry has adopted the public-private partnership model for modernisation of airports.

Funds for the modernisation would be raised by Airports Authority of India through debt markets and bonds. ‘’There is no need to go elsewhere right now. Our internal accruals are good.'’

Comments(0)

A man who was once a prime suspect in the Air India bombing has won the right to limited participation in a public inquiry into the tragedy that killed 331 people in June 1985.

Ripudaman Singh Malik was granted intervenor status Tuesday by former Supreme Court judge John Major, the head of the inquiry.

In a brief written ruling, Major cautioned that Malik’s interventions will be limited to challenging “any evidence that directly and adversely affects his reputation.”

Any submissions by Malik or his lawyers will have to be made in writing, at least to start. They will have to apply for leave if they want to go further and participate in oral statements and examination of witnesses.

Malik and Ajaib Singh Bagri were acquitted last year — after an 18-month trial — of criminal charges stemming from the downing of Air India Flight 182 by a bomb off the coast of Ireland in 1985.

The bombing, believed to be work of Sikh extremists campaigning for a separate homeland in northern India, took the lives of 329 passengers, most of them Canadian citizens of Indian origin or descent.

It was the worst terrorist attack ever mounted from Canadian soil, and the worst involving civil aviation anywhere in the world until the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks in the United States.

In a separate incident, a second bomb went off as Air India luggage was being transferred at Japan’s Narita airport, killing two baggage handlers.

Lawyers concerned character may be ‘impugned’

Malik’s lawyers had argued, in a written brief last week, that their client needed legal standing at the inquiry to protect his reputation and respond to any evidence that “may impugn his character.”

They also warned that Malik may want to ask for some evidence to be heard behind closed doors “where he anticipates prejudice to his reputation or other intimate matters.”

Major is required, under the inquiry’s terms of reference, to hear some evidence in private if it endangers national security as defined by the federal government.

He can consider other requests to hold closed hearings, but commission counsel Mark Freiman has noted it would be unusual to do so.

Seven given full standing at inquiry

Major has granted full standing at the inquiry to seven organizations and individuals, including the federal government, Air India and a number of family members who lost loved ones in the bombing.

Another nine groups and individuals, including Malik, will be permitted to play more limited roles.

Among them are a number of organizations with no direct link to the Air India tragedy, but that want to have a say on more general questions of anti-terrorist policy.

They include the Canadian Jewish Congress, B’nai Brith, the Canadian Council on American Islamic Relations and the Canadian Muslim Civil Liberties Association.

Major will examine a range of issues, including investigative turf wars between the RCMP and CSIS, airline security, better protection of witnesses in terrorist cases, and the possibility of holding high-profile trials before a three-judge panel rather than a single jurist.

Testimony is to begin in September and run through next April. A report is due in September 2007.

Comments(0)