Monthly Archives: March 2009

At last, a cheap alternative for Munich flights?

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Ryanair’s latest seemingly middle of nowhere airport is just outside the picturesque town of Memmingen (FMM) in Bavaria, which they are marketing as ‘Munich West’. Cheap flights to Memmingen start on 1 May from London Stansted and Dublin. So is this going to be a viable alternative to taking flights to Munich Franz Josef Strauss airport (MUC), a facility that no-frills airlines have often described as being high cost, and aimed at traditional scheduled airlines like Lufthansa?On the other hand, Munich has recently become a bit of a hotbed for no-frills competition, with Aer Lingus launching cheap flights from Gatwick at the end of April, complementing easyJet’s existing routes from both Gatwick and Stansted. We looked at a weekend trip to Munich flying out on Friday 1 May, the launch date for this route, and returning on Sunday 3rd May:

Ryanair cheap flights to Memmingen

  • Outbound flight — £.79. Depart Stansted 13:40 and arrive Memmingen 16:00.
  • Outbound taxes and fees — £28.97.
  • Return flight — £.79. Depart Memmingen 16:25 and arrive Stansted 16:45
  • Return taxes and fees — £15.05.
  • Credit or debit card handling fees — £9.50 (see article on how to avoid these)
  • Return train fare from Memmingen to Munich — €39.20 (£37 — does not include transfer from Memmingen airport to centre).
  • Total — £92.10.

easyJet cheap flights to Munich

       

  • Outbound flight — £35.99. Depart Gatwick 12:55 and arrive Munich 15:45 — twice daily easyJet flights to Munich are also available from Stansted. Note that if you travelled the day before, the fare goes down to £25.99.
  • Return flight — £23.99. Depart Munich 16:30 and arrive Gatwick 17:25. A cheaper flight is available in to Stansted for £18.99, but this means leaving Munich at 11:30 — a bit early for a weekend break. Alternatively, you could stay until 21:50 and catch a flight back to Stansted for £20.99.
  • Debit card handling fee — £1.95.
  • Total — £61.93.

    • Aer Lingus cheap flights to Munich

  • Outbound flights — £14.99. Depart Gatwick 06:40 and arrive Munich 09:25 — if you are going to take a whole day of work, you might as well make an early start of it! As with easyJet, the flight is cheaper if you can go one day before — in fact, in this case Aer Lingus will ‘give’ it to you for nothing.
  • Outbound taxes and charges — £20.
  • Return fare — zero.
  • Return taxes and charges — £9.99. Depart Munich 10:05 and arrive Gatwick at 11:05.
  • Handling fee — £8 — as with Ryanair, this fee can be avoided by using an electron debit card, but Aer Lingus only tell you about that at the end of the booking process.
  • Total — £52.98.

British Airways not so cheap flights to Munich

  • £110 – depart Heathrow 07:50 and arrive Munich 10:55 / depart Munich 17:30 and return Heathrow 18:30.

Lufthansa decidedly expensive flights to Munich

  • £157 — depart Heathrow 09:35 and arrive Munich 12:25 / depart Munich 19:10 and return Heathrow 20:10.

Verdict — as is so often the case, Ryanair’s seemingly cheap flights of £.79 in each direction become massively more expensive when all the extra charges are taken into account. Even this is before you add on the cost of a train fare from Memmingen airport in to Munich.

Memmingen itself actually looks like quite a pretty town, so it would be well worth a visit if you were in the area, but for the price comparison we have done here, it certainly can’t be seen as a cheap alternative to Munich. On the other hand, Aer Lingus’ new flights to Munich are an absolute steal, especially as the £8 handling fee can be avoided by using an electron debit card. This goes to show that a bit of competition at the main airport can be just as good as having a cheap alternative somewhere else, and gives the prospect of a weekend away in the Bavarian beer capital for less than £50.

We will certainly drink to that!

 

How to avoid airline credit card charge rip offs

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Have you been annoyed by airlines charging you up to £9.50 per person for a return flight booking, just for the privilege of handing over your own money to them? Do you know that if you fly with Aer Lingus, they add an £8 handling fee towards the end of the booking fee, but that there is a way of not having to pay this?

Avoiding card charge rip offs

The answer is simple – you just have to have the right piece of plastic:

The Visa Electron Card

Ironically, this card was previously associated with basic current accounts for people with a poor credit history. Most current accounts come with Visa Debit of Maestro Cards, and these can still attract the same high fees as paying by credit card. Although Easyjet charges more to pay by credit card, both Ryanair and Aer Lingus charge the same rate, regardless of how you pay – except if you use a Visa Electron card.

Fortunately, you don’t need to go round destroying your credit history in order to get a Visa Electron card. All you need to do is have an account with a bank which will issue you one. Ask you current account provider if they can do this. If not, we would recommend opening up a simple Cashminder account with the Co-operative bank. This can be topped up at any post office, so you don’t need to worry about whether or not you have a Co-op branch close to you. The account is even marketed as coming with no frills (just like the airlines) and no fuss (not like any airline we know!).

Once you have opened up one of these accounts, you just need to top it up each time you want to book a no frills flight – in much the same way that you might do for a pay as you go mobile. So we now have pay as you fly – it might be a bit more hassle than using your regular credit card, but it will cost you much less in the long run.

Double Dublin flights blow on St Patrick’s Day for Peel Airports

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Today might be St Patrick’s Day, but it can’t be a very good day for Peel, who have just lost flights to Dublin from two of the three airports they have in their portfolio. Ryanair are cancelling their cheap Dublin flights from both Doncaster Robin Hood airport and Durham Tees Valley, although they are claiming this is due to the implementation of a €10 tourism tax by the Irish government, rather than anything at the UK end. 

 

This really is the latest in a long string of bad news for Durham Tees Valley airport, who have recently lost a base operator Flyglobespan, cheap flights to Poland from Wizzair, and the Fly bmi feeder route into Heathrow. Let’s hope things don’t get any worse for them. 

 

 

Meanwhile, the outlook does not look so bad at Peel’s other airport in Liverpool. Although Ryanair did announce in February that they would cut back on some routes, the airport has still seen tremendous growth in recent years, and can truly be regarded as one of the great success stories in the UK aviation scene. With a strong Irish community in Liverpool, and Ryanair now established as a healthy competitor to easyJet on the Belfast route, in addition to the wide network of flights to the Irish Republic that they have been operating for several years, we do at least think that flights across the Irish Sea from Liverpool should remain secure for many years to come.

As BMI scrap flights, is Heathrow’s loss just Amsterdam’s gain?

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If ever there was a clear-cut argument in favour of Heathrow third runway, then it would be the fact that BMI have just scrapped their flights from Leeds Bradford and Durham Tees Valley to Heathrow. Anyone looking to transfer onto other flights will now have no option but to travel to Amsterdam with KLM instead, as neither of these airports offer hub feeder flights from any other airline.  

Proponents of Heathrow’s third runway argue that the extra capacity that would be created could be used to keep open domestic routes like these two, and also to connect other British cities with Heathrow which have lost their links due to the high taxes imposed on UK domestic flights. Obvious cities which might otherwise support flights into Heathrow would include Liverpool and Inverness in the north and Plymouth and Newquay in the southwest. Meanwhile, opponents argue that people should travel to Heathrow by rail, and that the overall number of flights should be reduced anyway, thus reducing the prospect of these routes from ever becoming viable again. 

Right now, the facts would appear to speak for themselves when it comes to connecting flights, but what about people who just want point-to-point travel between British regional cities and London? We would expect some passengers from Leeds Bradford and Durham to transfer to flights from Manchester and Newcastle respectively, but a far more significant number will travel by train. Both airports also talked about finding replacement airlines to open up new routes into London, but we heard the same rhetoric when VLM scrapped their Liverpool to London City flights. Perhaps Flybe could come onto the scene at Leeds Bradford, where they already have a presence, but I don’t see them operating Gatwick to Durham Tees Valley flights alongside their existing Gatwick to Newcastle route. 

When it comes to the economic arguments about losing jobs to Amsterdam, there is nothing new here. For many years, KLM have offered more feeder flights from UK regional airports than any other airline, and they are set to increase this further still when they open up their new Liverpool to Amsterdam flights at the end of this month. Naturally, this isn’t good news for the UK economy, but we shouldn’t forget that Heathrow’s third runway would come with considerable economic and environmental costs as well. Nor should we forget that the ‘hub and spoke’ model is an inefficient way of operating flights, even if there is always going to be a need for it on some routes.

Why Easyjet’s price guarantee is a total waste of time

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I’ve just taken a closer look at Easyjet’s price match guarantee, and can’t imagine very many people actually bother to claim on it. Here’s a few highlights:

1.Claims can only be made for flights to the same airport and city e.g. flights to Milan Linate and Milan Malpensa will not be treated as direct comparators.

This excludes virtually all Ryanair flights, as very few of their routes depart and arrive from the same airports that Easyjet use.

2.Claims can only be made for competitor flights which are due to depart within two hours of the departure time of the booked easyJet flights.

For those few same airport route pairs which are left, the need for the flights to depart within two hours of each other cuts down the likelihood of a cheaper flight being found still further.

7.Claims must be verified by easyJet. easyJet will verify the “competitor fare” within 24 hours of receipt (only during office hours: 9am-5pm Monday to Friday). If the ‘competitor fare’ cannot be verified on the internet the claim will be invalid. 

 This effectively says that if you do find a cheaper flight on Friday night, but Easyjet don’t verify it untl Monday morning, by which time the price has gone up, your claim will be invalid.

I can’t see many situations in which a potential passenger would pay for their flights, and then go and check prices on another airline’s website - usually price comparison is done before booking. If there really is a difference between the two, would it be worth booking with Easyjet, just to make the claim? I somehow doubt that they’d be keeping this price guarantee open for very long if too many people did that.

Upcoming articles and blog posts

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I thought I’d drop a quick note about articles we’ve got in production, and give any readers an opportunity to add their comments and suggestions before they go live:

  • Hidden charges – we know how much you hate them. So we’ll be doing a full A-Z of charges, and breaking it down airline by airline.
  • Airport architecture – low cost airlines might claim to hate ‘marble palaces’, but we’re sure that passengers prefer them to portakabins. We’ll take a look at some of the most impressive airports around the world – including major hubs and low cost airports.
  • Travel tips – I think this is a theme that could run forever, but we’re always keen to hear yours.
  • Site updates.
  • Alternative airports – we know that Hahn isn’t really anywhere near Frankfurt, but how good is your Geography? If the winning university challenge team stumbled to work out if Frankfurt was north or south of Cologne, how much should we expect from our site users? We’ll take a look at airports which might get you where you want to go much quicker (or cheaper) than the airport which serves the city you are trying to get to. Some are in different countries – or in one case, on another continent.
  • Detailed city pair guides. We’ve picked some top destinations and provided in-depth commentary about how to get there from various airports around the UK. For example, if you are looking for flights from Edinburgh to Philadelphia, we suggest taking direct flights from Glasgow instead. Alternatively, if you are travelling from Bristol, you will often be routed via New York, and then by train down to Philly.

This list will expand over the next few days, and we’ve also got a few hidden surprises coming up, so please stay tuned.

As we twitter away, Ryanair up the marketing drive

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Following on from last week’s fuss about toilets, lunatic bloggers and observations about them taking adverts for rival airlines, I should add that this week Ryanair have been offering sales where they seem to pick a random number out of a hat (between 2 and 5), and offer flights at that price, including ‘all taxes and charges.’ Is someone in Ryanair towers just rolling a dice to pick the flight price?

They say that 1 million seats are available each time, but if they sold 1 million each day, that would be 365 million per year – about 6 times the actual number of passengers they carry at all price points. Yet I have done a fair bit of checking, and as I said on Monday, there are seats available at these prices – even if you will sometimes have to be extremely flexible in your itinerary to take advantage. I made a booking myself on Sunday night, and opted to take flights out to Bologna, and back from Pisa – but that’s the way I normally book flights anyway, so I’m still happy.

My suspicions are that the majority of people will find one flight at the bargain price, and maybe see another at “0.00 GBP + taxes”, and leave it at that. Or worse, they will take a bargain flight out, and pay upwards of £50 for the return leg, as that’s the best fit they can find for their schedule.

The bottom line is to remember that Ryanair aren’t in the business of selling cheap flights to suit everyone’s diary, and as long as only a small percentage of customers take them up on their very lowest offers (I’d love to know how many, but I doubt they’d tell anyone that), they will still be in a position to make money of all the extras – some hidden, some voluntary, but they all add up unless you make a determined effort not to pay for any of them.