Originally Posted by
ChrL
Is airpass ever worth it for leisure travel? I tend to do a lot of weekend travel which is often booked at the last minute (e.g. within 2 hrs of travel) but which always includes a Saturday night stay. It looks like airpass is about 2x the buy-on-the-day rate for these flights.
eg) AUS/LAX is pretty much always about $600 return if booked on the day of travel but looks to be 1191 if booked via airpass.
I wondered the same thing after adding up all of our AA ticket spend this year (almost all F/J leisure travel), despite living in an outstation (dominant carrier is WN, so no bargains at DL or UA, either), and did some quick math. Assuming that the mileage is O/D, and not routing-based, the only J value at $.40/mile would be HKG/SYD (77W coming, otherwise Australia not possible.) For all of our European leisure destinations (UK, France, Germany), a little pre-planning (15-31 days) can still get you a "cheap" J fare that beats the pants off the aairpass rate.
It could have come in handy on our J capacity-limited SXM trip; the last I fares sold out the week before we could finalize our plans, and then it would have saved us the indirect routing and overnight. Except for these two rare occasions, I don't see the bang for the buck in the leisure category. I can find better deals on AA.com unless we want to do F to LHR on the spur of the moment.