Tag Archives: British Airways

Weigh me up before you go go

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One of the most frequent complaints at the moment about low-cost airlines — and even some very high cost airlines nowadays as well, especially for flying across the pond — is the amount being charged for checked baggage, sometimes up to £16 for shorthaul flights within Europe.

Personally, I’ve always felt that it is much fairer to charge for baggage, rather than giving people who want to carry a lot more with them a free ride, but the flipside of this is that the legacy airlines which don’t charge for checked baggage can suddenly become much better value when compared with their rivals which do.

When baggage charges started at just a few pounds each way, the little bit extra didn’t make that much difference, but £16 doubled could make a seemingly expensive £100 flight with an airline like British Airways, which would also include free food and drink, become much better value than a £70 return flight with Easyjet, and this is before you add in the cost of getting to and from a more remote airport like Stansted or Luton.

However, these extra luggage charges really do just reinforce the argument in favour of travelling light, not to mention making sure that you do know how much you are carrying before you leave. For this, we would have to recommend buying some form of travel scale — I have a simple lightweight analogue scale, made by Gotravel products, and available in the travel department of many major stores.

Here are a few personal tips for travelling light:

  • Clothes — how many do you really need? Hotel laundry might still be ridiculously expensive, but you would probably be better off by washing your clothes halfway through a holiday at a local launderette, rather than paying for extra baggage charges. It’s always worth taking some clothing to cater for sudden changes in the weather, but if you are packing tight, isn’t it better to wear that raincoat through the airport, rather than having to take an extra checked bag?
  • Camera — I used to travel with a large SLR where I went, sometimes complete with long zoom lenses, but now I just take a compact digital camera. Where are your pictures likely to end up? If they are only going to be shared with friends on the Internet, resolution is never really going to be that important, so a decent compact digital camera should give you the versatility you need, especially if you can find a model with a high enough ISO for flexibility when taking photos at night. even if you do plan to print your images, aspect ratio (print shops still default at 3:2) might be a more important consideration than megapixels, as a standard 6×4″ print at 300 dpi will need just 2 megapixels (1800x1200px).
  • Laptop — are you travelling for business or pleasure? If the former, then lightweight models can certainly save considerable extra hassle, and if the latter, then I hope you can just ditch the laptop and enjoy yourself! Same goes for PDAs etc, but if you must get yourself connected, you can always use a hotel business centre or Internet cafe.
  • Adapters and chargers — I used to take a whole load of different power adapters, especially to go with my laptop on camera, but as their technology has improved, most portable devices will go for several days now without being charged. Many hotels will have chargers for standard mobile phones behind the reception desk. Can you get by with just taking a spare battery?
  • Buying stuff on the way — buying souvenirs and other products might be part of a travel experience, but they could end up by lumping you with a whole load of extra charges to get home. Always bear in mind that if your goal is hand luggage only, you won’t be able to take any liquids over 125 mL through security, so it is best not to even look at those cheap wines and spirits. With the buying power of modern supermarkets, not to mention online, can you actually get the product you are looking at back home anyway? Work out the difference in price, and the cost of getting it home, and make your own decision. If you’re getting someone a gift, it might well be cheaper to post it direct from wherever you are — this will save you lugging it around all day anyway. Using the postal system might also be a way of avoiding checked baggage charges for your own stuff – so if you want a little bit more space in your bag for non-liquid gifts, why not leave the task of taking your dirty laundry home to the Postal Service?

If you do find yourself scrunching everything down just to fit in one bag to get through the airport, you might want to take a foldable backpack so that you can put your coat in it once you have reached your sunny destination.

Introducing terminal A – can you book scheduled flights at less than cost?

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Terminal A are a Spanish company whose unique proposition on the flights market is that they will sell you scheduled flights at ‘less than cost’, because they will hand some of the commission back to the user. This is a little bit of a cashback proposition for booking your flights, but is it worth the hassle?

I looked at Terminal A for flights from London to New York, departing 16 April 2009 and returning one week later. The best flights I was offered were with British Airways for £252.70. These flights come with a £1 discount — now I know that airlines have reduced their commissions lately, but am I really supposed to believe that British Airways and other airlines quoted on their New York flights results page pay just 0.4% commission on their long haul flights? Any commission-based discount is then wiped out by the £4 Terminal A service fee, leaving the British Airways flights at £256.70.

By comparison, Kayak.co.uk shows me direct flights with Kuwait Airways for £251 if I book with Ebookers, or £258 with British Airways — also booked with Ebookers, but only one pound cheaper than booking direct at BA.com. Checking Netflights.com takes the Kuwait Airways flights down to £249, but doesn’t get any further saving on other airlines. Meanwhile, a quick look over it Expedia shows that they might be giving away 200 nectar points, but they are charging £10 more for British Airways and £15 more for virgin — that looks like a handling fee, but they aren’t being transparent with their price breakdowns. The best Skyscanner can offer me is £287 — but this is hardly surprising, I don’t think Skyscanner’s strong point is on long-haul flights.

So is the consumer any better off by checking Terminal A as well as all the other flight comparison websites that are out there? I have to enter all my details to see if there are any more hidden fees for credit card processing or anything else — it doesn’t look like there are, but I always hate websites that want to take my valuable passport details from me before I can find out for certain how much they’re going to charge me.

Beady-eyed users might point out that is Terminal A have IATA membership at the bottom of their website, but no ATOL number — this is because they are headquartered in Spain, so that’s where you’ve got to go if you have any problems with your booking. In these uncertain times, I think that most passengers would want to choose security of booking over saving a few pounds, especially where there is such little saving on long-haul flights. If any users have any experience of terminal A, we’d love to hear them, just as we’d love to hear any samples of bigger discounts being available than the ones we found on flights to New York.

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!