littlevoices

Latest Version: Currently 0.3a, Released on 13th February 2010
Latest version has all the latest *A flights, including CO/SN and differentiated Business/Economy pricing as well as seasonal routings.

Hi all,

I've created a simple BMI Redemption calculator in Excel to work out the likely approximate cost of a BMI award flight - it builds in the great work from salvadors(and now my own tax calculations from his inspiration) (http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/bmi-d...xes-chart.html) to add taxes, as well as a bit of my own code (I did this as part of a refresh of my Excel skills). CheeseToastie gave me a helping hand in getting more routings and a few other data points to make the tool more comprehensive - thanks!

So you put in your route, airline and class - In return it will tell you the expected airmiles, cash and taxes cost of that flight (for both a C+M and all miles routing).

Its not a replacement for ITA, but, it is (at least for me) a good way to quickly work out what routes/airlines are available for certain cities (it autopopulates with only valid routes), and an approximate cost of my potential redemptions (in miles and cash) before I dig down into the final pricing & availability plus being able to double check the ICC's sums.

You can download it here from a free hosting site (sorry about any ads, nothing to do with me);
http://www.mediafire.com/file/wigedn...ator-v0.3a.zip

If you notice any bugs, or would like me to add any features then please let me know - there is a list of data points that I'm looking for to expand it - if anyone can help me with the below please do let me know;

• An automatic check of the classes available on a route - this would require a list of airline routes and classes available (in no hurry to do this as it changes too frequently)
• Complete the list of countries that *A flies to, but for which I didn't know the BMI zone

Hope this is useful for someone - its been fun for me to quickly price up redemptions,

Regards

littlevoices

PS: It was much simpler to do the calculator using code, as such you'll need to enable Macros to let it work. I've left the code unprotected though so you can check there isn't anything malicious there.

CheeseToastie

Try this.

Great idea, will have a play!

bmiStar

My next reward includes CO so only getting part of the picture, but great tobe able to see those taxes add up by route/airline.

Thanks for taking the time ^

baggageinhall

Tried running it on my Mac. It's painfully slow and for some reason I can't click on the calculate button, it selects the cell behind it instead.

It may be my machine, perhaps someone else with a Mac can tell you.

Great concept though.

(My only other thought, perhaps someone with some web skills could help you turn this into a web based calculator)

aiagaia

The excel-sheet works fine with me. ^ Except cells "cost_taxes" and "cost_taxes_cm" which only include the first five lines of flights.

orudge

I have actually recently been working on something vaguely similar to this (well, the opposite of this, I guess) - a mileage earning calculator, but specific to Diamond Club. You enter your route, fare buckets and airlines, as well as Diamond Club status level, and it should give you an accurate printout of status and destination miles earned. It's not finished yet, but if I get some time to finish it up, I could conceivably then help you convert this useful spreadsheet into a web application.

anishub

It is awesome!
(although I am still trying to figure out the workings)

May I suggest if someone could built a macro that can give the best routing/airline for a particular city pair? That would be very useful for folks who are building an itenerary, especially on *A carriers.

Thank you for the great jobs well done.

RAPC

Forgot to say thanks for this earlier. Good stuff ^

IMH

This is nice, thank you littlevoices. I look forward to future versions with the enhancements listed in the OP, in particular taxes for premium cabin redemptions.

SQFAN

littlevoices thank you. Let me play with it and I'll revert with comments later. Thanks for your efforts.

rawilliam

You just answered a lot of questions that I had! Great tool.

littlevoices

Hi all,

Thanks for the kind comments, and thanks to CheeseToastie for a few data sources (UK APD & a method for calculating the distance between airports).

As a result I've updated the tool to include a UK Air Passenger Duty calculation and miles between airports (you never know, it might help you work out the longest leg for some reason....)

I've also put in the following fixes;

• Taxes only included the first 5 flights - Now counts all 10
• The credit card payment was double counting with multiple passengers in some scenarios - tweaked the formula

Based on the comments around the Mac being slow (I can't test as I don't have one) I'd recommend;

• - Change the cell saying 'Calculate costs as you go along' to "No"
• - Complete all your flights etc
• - Manually run the (new in version 0.2) Macro called RunManualCalculation - not sure if it will work or not, I don't have a Mac to test.

In my own view there are too many different factors (key being seat availability - but also the airline quality, taxes, cost in BD miles, distance, flight connections) to consider - whilst it would be feasible (with quite a lot of coding) I think you'd get much better feedback on the board by asking, rather than using an Excel calculator so I won't be spending the time adding this at the moment.

-----------------------------

And everyone is right, it would be much better on the web, sadly I've no web hosting (or desire to get) and this was only a bit of a refresher course in Excel for me - not a web programming exercise . Feel free to develop one of your own, and you're quite welcome to reuse my code too - happy to help with that but sure it would be simple to do with PHP & MySQL.

mattk

Thanks littlevoices, great calculator and a great piece of programming.

I have a query/tip about the calculator and multi-legs which threw me until I split up a multi-part journey. What I did was to enter the following legs on the same sheet (as one-way):

1) LHR HKG NZ Business (ie. a stop over here for a few days)
2) HKG AKL NZ Business
3) AKL LHR NZ Business (and coming all the way back in one go)

Doing this you only get a total expenditure of 6,750 miles which is far too few. Omitting Line 3 will give you the right total on the way out and to get the return total you simply have to do another sheet with the return leg by itself. Not sure what's going on but I thought I'd share it with you and anyone else incase they faced something similar.

Thanks again! ^

littlevoices

The selecting of this as a one-way is the problem... the poor tool thinks that you are just doing a LHR-LHR flight (for some reason) - changing it to return will get the right answer.

But you're right - putting in a one-way to the same airport should be flagged as an error - I've fixed for the next version, now I think I need to find my own way of scraping these taxes as I haven't had anything back from Salvadors yet about an update

oliver2002

Nice tool... just one request: can you add MUC?