Travel with BA from Cork, Shannon and Knock - a pictorial guide


The above photo, taken at Shannon in July 2013 was part of the publicity and training tour for the A380 launch. The other aircraft is the A318 used on the LCY-SNN-JFK service.

It is often advantageous for BAEC members to begin and end their travels in Dublin - fares are often much lower than starting from London, particularly - but not only - for Club World travel. The BA forum has many threads on this. What is less well known is that these fares are also available from other airports in the Irish Republic, and can be combined via the recently restructured codeshares, now offered by BA on Aer Lingus services from Cork and Shannon to London Heathrow Terminal 2. From May 2016 Norwegian is running direct services from Cork to Boston, and has announced plans to expand to JFK in 2017: in the past this sort of activity has led to price wars between BA and Norwegian.



Other oneworld competitively priced longhaul travel with IB, Finnair and AA is also possible from ORK and SNN.

Advantages and Disadvantages of using Cork and Shannon
There are several advantages to using Cork or Shannon:
- Much smaller airports, doing a back to back is a lot easier and faster than Dublin
- Less congested airports compared to Dublin, in terms of air traffic delays
- Direct USA services from Shannon with preclearance - and these can be the lowest fares available in Ireland
- The timings may work better than Dublin
- If staying the night, the hotels are cheaper, of good quality and closer to the airport than DUB
- There is lounge access for BAEC Silver and Gold members on Aer Lingus (but not for other oneworld Sapphires/Emeralds).
- Occasionally there is availability on DUB services, particularly close to departure.
- Depending on your start point, other airlines' services to SNN or ORK can be cost or time effective as your bridging point for the exIreland fare.
- Maybe you've done DUB a few times and you want a change of scene.

Some disadvantages of going via ORK or SNN:
- DUB is generally still cheaper by £30 or so, when there is availability - which is most of the time.
- There are a lot more services to/from DUB.
- Not all ORK services can be done back to back
- Aer Lingus operate via LHR T2 rather than T5 (in the case of BA's own DUB service). If your longhaul is from LHR T3 then T2 is better placed.
- Aer Lingus currently only offers economy class on all its Irish services, so you will typically earn 20 TPs on that leg rather than 40 TPs in Club Europe from DUB. You will also earn slightly fewer Avios too.
- The direct Shannon services are cheap for a reason: they use some of the airlines' more elderly equipment.

About this guide
The purpose of this guide is partly to help introduce the Cork and Shannon option to forum members who haven't considered this before. This thread will hopefully give useful information for those looking for an alternative to Dublin. We will look at back to back arrangements, as well as longer connection options.

It's also partly to help anyone thinking of using the BA codeshares to visit Ireland. BA sell tickets from London to Dublin, Shannon, Cork and Knock as BA codeshares on Aer Lingus, so earning Tier Points and Avios in line with BA's own offering. However it will almost always be cheaper to buy direct from Aer Lingus - you won't get TPs, and the Avios earn will be low, however. On the other hand, if starting somewhere outside London, including UK domestic locations, using these codeshares can be reasonable value for money - for example JER-LGW-NOC is £95 single, GLA is £109.

I have added Knock West Ireland to this guide for completeness and frankly novelty value. It is available as a BA codeshare but I haven't found any reason for using this airport. I don't think anyone else has either.

Finally I've added a section about travel on Aer Lingus, including baggage and check in issues - this would also be relevant to anyone travelling out of Dublin too. However there is also a "clinic" thread for Dublin travel logistics here:
http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/briti...ic-thread.html

Where to get quotes and buy tickets
To begin, a much abbreviated paragraph on how to get a cheap flight, many FTers can skip this bit: Say you want to go to Las Vegas. You find a service from LHR to LAS, but it seems rather expensive. You then change the BA.com query to (say) Ireland/ ORK to LAS and though it's in Euros you can immediately see it's a lot cheaper, even though it could be on the same LHR-LAS service as your first query. So you book ORK-LHR-LAS. Then you book a separate return from LHR to ORK and back to wrap around the trip. If not starting at LHR there could be even better bargains bearing in mind the other ways to get to Cork, see the other services mentioned under each airport.

One of the best places to start is the BA.com, it is able to quote for flights from Cork and Shannon. It can also do so for Knock, but that's unlikely to be cost effective except within Europe. If you are doing a Ireland - UK - North America trip of 2 flights each way then this is a perfectly reasonable way forward. As shown here, the price below is in Euros, but you can call BAEC to get a GBP price instead, this may save you money on exchange rates, indeed the BA internal exchange rate is about the best you can get.



If you are doing something more complicated, specifically domestic flights within the USA, you may want to call BAEC or use AA.com (which can quote in sterling if you make the UK your location). This is because BA.com will bias towards BA codeshares within the USA and treat domestic flights as business class even when flying AA First. By asking for AA prime flight numbers instead you should be able to get First Tier Points and Avios for the same fare.

For more complexity you may want to play with ITA Matrix or Google Flights to see if you can up with quotes for your particular scenario. The BA Tier Point run thread (available via the Forum Dashboard) often has information on Dublin fares - broadly speaking these fares will also be available from Cork and Shannon, with Shannon possibly having cheaper fares than Dublin in some circumstances.

You can also use travel agents to make these bookings, including online travel agents, but for the latter in particular they have a poor track record when things go wrong.