Originally Posted by
pdxparse
I'm new to these sort of runs and this thread but was able to cobble together the following (on hold until tomorrow) for April 1-5.
SFO-JFK-MIA-PTY-MIA-LAX $774.76
I'm staging from PDX, so tickets to/from SFO/LAX run an extra $160 so under $1K total.
Question - is this an amazing value premium fare deal out of PDX, or just good/average in your opinion? At $440 is was a no brainer. I have a flexible schedule - wondering if I should jump on this or keep looking for other fun long haul deals for 2016.
Very good question. Yes, the $440 fare was a no-brainer, and I quite literally stumbled across it on a fluke, having already booked a second ticket on the same routing a few days earlier for the $702 stated in my subject line. Even
that was an anomaly; as you've seen, the usual fare is closer to $800.
Nonetheless, keep the following in mind:
this fare should not exist, PERIOD. While yes, AA flies from LAX to PTY via MIA for about the same price, it's just flat-out
weird that they not only let you instead route via JFK, too, but let you do so via their far-superior A321T transcon service. (AA has four daily LAX-MIA nonstops, but three of them are standard domestic metal. The fourth is an older 767 with angled-flat seats in business. Oddly, it's the only one that's
not a red-eye flight.)
What
can be fairly stated is that AA is aggressively combating jetBlue's expansion into the region from its FLL hub. (Still, that doesn't explain the PTY fares; jetBlue/B6 doesn't fly here.) By "region" I mean what I guess you could call "Northern South America." B6 now flies not only to Bogota and Medellin, but also to Quito and even all the way down to Lima! I haven't checked Lima, but you can swap in any of the other three cities for PTY and still get a total fare under $1,000.
But again, none of these fares should, by any rational right, exist, so it's impossible to say how long it'll be before someone figures out the FT Jig. :-) Clearly AA knows about it, given the rapidity with which the $430 fares disappeared, so for all we know they've already instituted some sort of controls to keep such fares from reoccurring. (NB: It's nonetheless interesting that they didn't try to push it off as an error fare, as they infamously did last year in the Brazilian Incident.)
So, to answer your question: yes, all of these fares (whether out of PDX or SFO or LAX or wherever) are an amazing value, even if they are -- for the time being, at least -- "everyday" fares. There's no better ongoing EQM deal on a cost-per-mile basis
anywhere within the OW system (for J fares, that is), or at least not one anyone here knows about. Will the super-awesome $430 fares return? My educated guess would be "more unlikely than likely." Hope that at least sorta helps!