Mid-Pacific break
[Originally posted 2 March 2007. Update Nov 2007: Jetstar only flies to Honolulu from Sydney, not Melbourne. Air Canada now offers non-stop flights SYD<==>YVR for about $1600. Just learned that six weeks after I flew Harmony Airways in February, they went bust!! Stephen Downes was right--Westjet would have been a better bet!]In the 1980s there were several airlines that flew the whole way between the country of my birth, Canada, and my country of citizenship, Australia. But in recent years the only way to get across is either Qantas/Alaska Airlines or United/Air New Zealand, which operate a virtual duopoly. Fares have soared to AUD2600 for an economy class return seat and sales just don't happen. Since I live in Melbourne, I also don't want to have to go through Sydney to get in and out of the country. Being that my career is in transformation, I had to find a cheaper way to get there.
JetStar, a new, wholly-owned Qantas subsidiary, just started a no-frills service to Honolulu from Melbourne. I got a sale seat for about AUD800 return. You have to bring your own food or pay for it on the plane. I then hung out for a good deal between Hawaii and Vancouver. I had four choices. Air Canada is reviled by Canadian travellers, so that was ruled out on principle. Air Pacific, part-owned by Qantas, was rejected because of the political unrest in Fiji, where it is based. That left the regional Canadian carriers WestJet and Harmony Airways. I chose Harmony because it offered a full service, and found a return fare equivalent to AUD770. I was able to purchase these seats online, including seat allocation.
In the old days, your best apex fares were purchased well in advance. Now, you wait as late as you can for the airlines to offer discounted fares to fill up the planes, but not too late so as to miss out. If you need to make connections, it's a risky business.
A downside to such interline transfers is that you have to put up with stopovers. On the way to Vancouver, I had to wait six hours in Honolulu. That wasn't so bad. On the way home, I had to overnight in Waikiki since nothing could connect to the 8:00 am JetStar departure. Online, I found a clean, inexpensive hostel and figured out how to book the inexpensive Roberts Hawaii shuttle bus.
While wandering around Waikiki in the late afternoon, I found a strange denizen divide. Along the streets where shops were, most tourists were from Japan, China and Korea. So many restaurants were signed entirely in Japanese--the reverse colonisation appears to be complete! Meanwhile, the beach and its hotel terrace bars were populated with pasty-white, fiddly, overweight Americans on their week-long packaged President's Day holiday.
My lasting memory is of seeing a middle-aged man who's skin had never seen daylight, sitting alone on one of a hundred hired deckchairs conforming out from a beachside Sheraton Hotel pool, reading Jack Kerouak's unconventional On the Road.
FlickR credit: Joseph Taylor
Ah, if you had asked Canadians, they would have told you to take WestJet.
As Air canada gets worse (and they are now very bad) WestJet gets better (and they are now very good).
Posted by
Downes |
04 March, 2007 00:02
Thanks so much for your comment, Stephen! Yes, I have heard good things about WestJet. However, I was happy with Harmony and can only judge what I experienced.
Posted by
rlubensky |
04 March, 2007 09:05
Hmmm. I like AirCanada because I like their web site for booking flights. For finding the information I want it beats any airline website I've ever visited. I can, in a single page, see the flights on either side (1 column per day) and the lowest price available on each flight, one row per flight time. This helps me see that for example I can save $30 on a flight to Calgary by leaving an hour earlier. So, how much is that hour of sleep worth.
So what exactly do people dislike about Air Canada. Is it just a principled thing, as good capitalists we shouldn't support state owned/managed enterprises, or more mildly as good capitalists we expect a state owned enterprise to be less efficiently run? I used to have such beliefs but now that I've worked for a large company long enough to see all it's inefficiencies I have reverted to taking things on their merits.
In my opinion, flying is getting steadily easier, air tickets, online booking and now I can even "checkin" at home or more realistically at a machine that has zero queue length. This last I have only experienced with Air Canada though for all I know Wesjet provides it as well.
Posted by
John |
22 March, 2007 13:51
If everyone hated Air Canada, they'd be out of business. Since I repeatedly hear stories about poor service, I took the decision to look elsewhere. That's the analogue method of collaborative filtering. If you are happy with the total experience there (ie. online access, terminals, schedules, inflight service, baggage handling), then great, you have no reason to shift your preference. But how does your Air Canada experience of today compare with that of 20 years ago? Do the flexibility options now offered by most airlines (like web check-in) come at the expense of a fall in quality in other areas? We all have a different idea of where the balance lies between cheap fares and service quality.
Posted by
rlubensky |
22 March, 2007 14:58
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