In May 2013, American Express and British Airways started to offer a joint conversion bonus, which offered a 30% bonus on converting American Express Membership Rewards (for cards issued in India), to Avios. Amex MR usually convert to Avios @ 2MR = 1 Avios, however, with this promotion, it goes down to 1.54 MR = 1 Avios. The deadline to convert to Avios is by 15 July, so if you’d like to ride on this conversion, I’d advise you to move your MR to Avios within the next day or two. Amex to BA conversions usually take about 24 hours to reflect in the Avios account. You could find the details in the above mentioned post. In June 2013, Jet…
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It is a good time to book your festive travel now
Airfares have been hitting the roof, or that is what I have been hearing for a while now. And it has to be the case, with inflation and oil prices both heading upwards, and the instance of Kingfisher going under, that airlines realised they can’t keep on dishing out discounting tickets and hope to even break even, forget making profits. However, sales come out from time to time, and this year we saw SpiceJet, Indigo, Air India and Jet Airways all throwing their hat in the ring every time one of them dropped prices. For my personal travel, as long as I have visibility on various travels, I prefer to book it far out during one of these sales of…
Going RTW: Introduction & Trip Index
Introduction Check-in: Celebrations Lounge, Terminal 2, Mumbai (BOM) Airborne: Flight EY205 (BOM-AUH), Etihad Airways, Pearl Business Class, Airbus A320-200 Check-in: Etihad First Class Lounge, Terminal 3, Abu Dhabi (AUH) Airborne: Flight EY101 (AUH-JFK), Etihad Airways, Diamond First Class, Airbus A340-600 Hotel Holiday Inn LaGuardia Airport, New York Check-in: Air Canada Maple Leaf Lounge, Central Terminal, LaGuardia (LGA) Airborne: Flight UA343 (LGA-DEN), United Airlines, First, Boeing 757-200 Check-in: United Club West, Concourse B, Denver (DEN) Airborne: Flight UA4918 (DEN-COS), United Express, Economy, Dash 8-400 Cheyenne Resort, Colorado Springs Airborne: Flight AA1320 (DEN-DFW), American Airlines, First, Boeing MD-80 Airborne: Flight AA2493 (DFW-LAX), American Airlines, Coach, Boeing 757-200 Check-in: American Airlines/Qantas Flagship Lounge, Los Angeles (LAX) Airborne: Flight AA30 (LAX-JFK), American Airlines, Business,…
Air India pays its employees to fly on free tickets
In one of the most amusing stories I’ve read recently, Air India paid out the value of 700 tickets to its employees, for tickets which were free in the first place. Air India has had a companion flies free promotion on offer for a while, where a full fare ticket in any of the three cabins gets you another ticket in the same cabin free of cost. You could find details of the promotion here. However, as per this news report in the Hindustan Times, The deal is good enough as it is, but in Air India it came to mean other things. There, passengers (read Air India employees) travelled on the free ticket and then sent it to the…
5 days to the Mumbai meet on 13 July 2013
I’ve been looking forward to meet all of you for a while now. This is the reason I am working on organising the first meetup with those of you interested this weekend in Mumbai. You could look up this post for the details. A couple of weeks back when I announced this, I had just got the date in mind, and now we have venue details available as well. The plan is to meet in the afternoon at about 3 PM, in Bandra West, at Gostana. If you’re interested in the food, well, they flip yummy burgers and make lovely salads and all this with a dash of healthy quotient to it. Its a buy your own event, and I…
Deal Alert: LA –Mumbai flights on Turkish for $785
Via Airfarewatchdog, there is a fare out there on Turkish Airlines for travel between Los Angeles and Mumbai (round trip), which is pricing out only at $785 for Economy travel. There are quite some dates available in February 2014. Just turn up on www.turkishairlines.com and look out for the fare with various dates within the specified dates above. While there are $785 fares, there are also other fares for a little upwards of $800 in case the lowest fare does not work for you. I’ve usually flown this route at an average price of $1300 on other airlines in the past, so it looks like a great deal coming if you’d like to fly over to India. And while you…
Air India to connect Amritsar to Birmingham via Delhi on the B787
Its been in the GDS systems for a few days already, however Air India finally came around to announcing their Amritsar (ATQ) – Delhi (DEL) – Birmingham (BHX) flight on their new Boeing 787 planes from 1st August 2013. The new route will be operated 4 times a week on Monday, Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday, and is aiming to connect the burgeoning Indian community in Birmingham and Amritsar. Passengers from and to Amritsar will not have to change planes at Delhi. This is the second new route for the B787 in August. The other one getting launched is the B787 flights to Australia. Here are the timings of the flight, as per AirlineRoute.net : AI113 DEL1330 – 1800BHX 788 x357…
GoIbibo offering free movie tickets on flight & hotel bookings
GoIbibo has recently launched a new promotion to give away a couple of movie tickets with each flight ticket or hotel reservation you book on their website. Valid till July 31, 2013, the promotion is valid if you use the promocode GOMOVIE while booking up, and you can receive upto two vouchers (of 2 tickets each), during the offer period (per email id). However, be aware that the movie tickets are booked manually by a company called cinerewardz.com where you need to give them various options to book tickets, and they will perhaps end up booking the cheapest one for you. Here are the complete terms & conditions. You get upto 10 November 2013 to redeem the voucher, so you…
Air Arabia fare sale to UAE open till July 5
Air Arabia, the low-cost carrier which operates out of Sharjah, UAE has announced a special faresale for 72-hours between July 3 to July 5, between Mumbai, Delhi, Ahmedabad, Jaipur, Kochi and Thiruvananthapuram to Sharjah and onwards to select GCC and Middle-Eastern routes. Fares look attractive, and include a free baggage allowance of 20kgs as well. Tickets booked under this promotion are valid for travel till August 5, 2013. Here are some of the sample fares indicated on the website, one way. Live From A Lounge is present on Facebook, Twitter & available via email, RSS.
Go Air moves to Terminal 1A in Mumbai
Terminal 1A at Mumbai has been the centre of questions ever since they had to throw out Kingfisher Airlines because of the non-payment of dues. When they eventually made the bold move, there was an abnormality, where Terminal 1B was handling 4 airlines (Indigo, Jet/JetKonnect, SpiceJet and GoAir), while Terminal 1A just had Air India. Here is how terminal 1A looked like: However, GoAir has moved its operations from Terminal 1B to Terminal 1A with effect from July 1, 2013. The airline currently operates 360 movements per week from the city. An aisle of check-in counters at Terminal 1A is now be available for GoAir passengers. The airline has also move its ticketing office to the new premise. It seems…
Air India to launch Delhi–Sydney/Melbourne triangular flights on their B787s
Back in February 2012, I had written a post about the plans Air India had to launch their Boeing 787 flights to go over to Australia, in a triangular flight to Sydney and Melbourne. The timing aspect did not quite work out in the manner they thought they’d like to launch, and late 2012 has now become August 2013, however, they are good to go, and launch a daily flight as of end-August 2013 between these cities. They are going back to Australia after 16 years, and I hope they get enough traffic to justify this decision. As per AirlineRoutes.net, the flight is going to go 4 times a week in terms of Delhi-Sydney-Melbourne direction, and 3 times a week…
