Understanding Nothing

All my playing with end-of-year travel plans has given me itchy feet. I’d like to go somewhere interesting for a few days sometime soon, but I don’t really care so much where. This is something the internets are meant to help with, but though the US is well served with any number of useful quirky travel sites, Europe doesn’t have so many of the “Just show me good deals” versions if you don’t live in certain key cities. So, in the DIY spirit, I wrote my own. I gathered a list of all the commercial airports I could find in Europe, grouped them by country, and wrote a script that searched on ITA in turn for all flights from Tallinn to any airport in that country over the next 30 days, and tell me the cheapest date to travel there. It’s a slightly nasty site to screen-scrape (and I’m pretty sure they don’t have any alternatives that you don’t have to pay for, as some of the puzzles they set job applicants involve scraping the site), and the code certainly isn’t pretty, but, thanks to Google Charts, the results are:

(Green is the cheapest, red the most expensive, yellow somewhere inbetween.)

My plan is to widen this beyond Europe, have it run every day, set some threshholds and have it email me any time something interesting appears. I suspect, however, that I’m much better served from Riga:

Thankfully there’s a comfortable bus to there!

Star Alliance claim to be ‘committed to delivering to you the latest flight schedules from the Star Alliance members on multiple platforms Anytime, Anywhere.”‘ (emphasis mine). What’s more they go on to explain that that means that it will be ‘Automatically updated on your platform of choice.’

That is unless your ‘platform of choice’ is anything other than a Windows PC or a handheld with Palm OS, as their Electronic Timetable doesn’t run on, for example, a Mac. Instead we need to just make do with a hulking big PDF.

So, I decided to parse all the data out of that PDF, and on the basis that others might find it useful, make it available as a CSV file: Star Alliance Timetable 2009-05.

It’s nothing fancy, but being able to open it in Excel and filter on the various columns is still quite useful, and of course it opens up any number of other possibilities. I’m also considering building a little mini-application that makes it easier to play with, so if anyone has any suggestions for that, I’m all ears.

I’ve been a bmi Diamond Club holder for many years. Unlike most Frequent Flier programs, airmiles you earn in this scheme never expire, so I’ve built up quite a few of them. However, it’s looking increasingly likely that bmi won’t actually be around for much longer — at least not in its current form. The most likely outcome seems to be a takeover by Lufthansa, and subsequent conversion of Diamond Club to their nowhere-near-as-good Miles and More scheme. So it’s looking like a good time to turn all my airmiles into a fun end-of-year escape-the-Tallinn-winter trip.

I’ve spent quite a bit of time over the last week learning how best to go about that, and discovering all manner of interesting ways of combining the various rules in interesting ways. (Much of this is learned from the fine folks at Flyer Talk, which, once you can get beyond all the jargon, is an amazing source of tips, tricks, and useful advice.)

The first thing you need to get the hang of is the bmi zone chart. Rather than spending miles based on the actual distance you fly, the world is divided up into a series of zones, and you pay a fixed rate per flight based on the zones you’re flying to/from. (This is purely in terms of the miles spent—you still need to pay the taxes depending on the airports you use, which, of course, differ everywhere.) I found it hard to keep track of which countries were in which zone, so I drew a pretty map.

The biggest problem with constructing a suitably interesting trip is that you’re only allowed one stop-over (visiting a city en-route for more than 24 hours) per ticket. So, for example, if you were to book a return from London to Sydney you’d only be allowed to stop off in other place (e.g. Singapore) in either direction. However, you can purchase one way tickets, so by getting two of those, instead of a return, you now get a stop-over in each direction, so could stop, for example, in Singapore for a couple of weeks on the way there, and Thailand on the way back.

What I then noticed was that to go from Zone 2 (Central/Eastern Europe — where I currently am) to Zone 10 (Australia/NZ — where I want to go) is 50,000 miles each way, but two singles from Zone 2 to Zone 8 (East Asia) and then Zone 8 to Zone 10 are only 25,000 each. Thus, by going via South Korea or Japan, for example, you can effectively get 3 free stops in each direction – effectively turning a naïve two destination trip (e.g. Copenhagen – (Bangkok) – Auckland – Copenhagen) into a seven destination trip for the same price (e.g. Copenhagen – (Bangkok) – Tokyo – (Hong Kong) – Auckland – (Sydney) – Seoul – (Delhi) – Copenhagen)! These are all published Star Alliance routes: Air Asiana, for example, fly Seoul to Copenhagen via Delhi and Zurich three times a week.

If you really wanted to, you could also (again, for the same price) omit the last ticket, and return Auckland–Copenhagen via L.A. or Vancouver turning it into a complete round the world trip at half the mileage cost of an actual round-the-world ticket!

I wrote a little script to analyse the entire zone chart for other free multi-zone detours, and discovered there were quite a few of them (including some where the detour actually lowered the total price, such as Zones 2–7 via 10 which is only 70,000 miles, instead of 80,000 direct!)

Of course, the longer the route, the more complexity there is in trying to piece it all together.  You get significantly more value spending the miles on business class flights than on economy, but availability on those disappears quite far in advance on popular routes (and isn’t available at all on many Singapore Airlines flights as they reserve those for their own card-holders rather than their Star Alliance partners). But I’m currently contemplating trying to piece together a 2-10-7-9-8-2 route, which is only 110,000 base miles, and would theoretically allow something along the following lines:

Riga – (Cairo) – Bombay – (Bangkok) – Manila – (Tokyo or Sydney) – Auckland – (Shanghai) – Tashkent or Almaty – (Istanbul) – Riga.

Which, if I can pull it off, isn’t bad for only 10,000 miles more than a simple Riga–Auckland return! Suggestions / alternatives / gotchas / etc. welcomed!

Karen thinks that Narita might be her favourite airport. Personally, I hated it. I’ve had a few bad immigration experiences before (all in the US, natch), but my arrival in Japan was definitely the worst of my round-the-world trip. If I recall correctly (and I’m willing to accept that I may have somewhat exaggerated the story in my mind), it took somewhere in the region of 39 hours from entering the Immigration Hall until actually getting processed, with at least half of that involving being slowly shunted around in a dense mass of people all slowly wending their way towards an actual queue. To make matters worse, between the time I bought my RTW ticket and when I actually arrived, Japan introduced the process of fingerprinting all tourists. I was tempted to try to remove mine, but, well, that would have required too much pain.

My best airport experience of the trip, as previously reported was in Dunedin, but as it was for a domestic flight it doesn’t really count. My arrival in NZ was quite a mess, but that was mostly due to the boarding desk in Tonga checking me and my luggage the whole way through to Dunedin, even though they weren’t supposed to, as I needed to clear immigration and customs in Auckland first. And having a pot of hot coffee tipped over me by a flight attendant on the connecting flight didn’t help much either, but that’s not really an airport story…

My arrival in Samoa was probably the simplest process of anywhere: the immigration desk was staffed by a very friendly and welcoming woman who seemed positively enthusiastic to see everyone, and customs was a fairly simple “put your bags on this conveyer belt so we can x-ray them” affair. Unfortunately I associate that arrival with the subsequent no-show of the transportation that had been pre-arranged to take me to my accommodation, and the overly aggressive taxi-drivers who volunteered to take me there instead. I was finally rescued by the mini-bus for a neighbouring hotel who then got confused as to where I’d said I was staying proceeded to leave me at a completely different place. Thankfully I noticed that the sign outside it didn’t seem quite right before the driver disappeared.

So I suspect I’m left with Sydney as the best all-round arrival process. There everything flowed incredibly smoothly and quickly, and I was outside looking for a cab quicker than getting off a lot of domestic flights.

Oslo still remains my all-round favourite airport, though. There’s a sense of design and beauty about it that you just don’t see in most airports.

And I’m still a little bemused that Tallinn airport seems to have tripled in size since my departure. I was the second person off the plane, and was very glad I wasn’t the first, as I would have had no clue where to go if I hadn’t been able to just follow someone who had obviously been through it before. We arrived away at the far side of the airport where they punish incoming passengers from the UK and Ireland for being non-Schengen, and they don’t really seem to have managed to put up any signage yet for how to get to anywhere.

I expect that any of the side trips I take over the next few months will be much smoother, however, now that most of Europe is effectively borderless.