Originally Posted by
Pjay
I am new to international travel and here to seek advice from you experienced travelers, before making any newbie mistakes. This is a wonderful source of information - all of you are so generous with your time.
My family and I want to travel in the mid-late fall to Portugal, leaving from Albuquerque NM. We don’t have any particular loyalty to a specific airline, but want to find a good confluence of comfort (hoping to to use our miles for business class) and duration.
From what I have read on FlyerTalk we most likely want to avoid TAP. What reliable and comfortable airlines and routes would you recommend, given our more isolated airport location?
The airline's fine, but in case of IRROPs, things aren't easy to sort out. Given that whatever you book now will probably change now, I wouldn't book tickets through TAP. You mention you want to use miles - chances are your miles are not with TP, so the ticket would be issued by someone else. TP will probably change their schedule more than once, but you can be fairly sure that EWR-LIS/OPO and MIA-LIS will continue.
No issues with TP intra-EU.
Flights seem mostly to offer 2 stops from ABQ; DEN, EWR then to Europe being the most common combination, or else SLC direct to Europe, or LAX direct. I don’t know anything about the difference in comfort on the aircraft or airlines flying from these departure cities, so advice on this area would also be most helpful from those of you who have the experience. Delta offers KLM or Air France, American offers British Air through London or Iberia through Madrid, United (I think) has flights on Air Canada through Canada and Lufthansa via Germany. United also has direct flights from EWR and American from Philadelphia.
Depends on what miles you have and what award availability there is. You're also assuming that Europe will be open for non-Europeans by fall. It seems that from ABQ, you're best off on star alliance.
You really have 2 options: fly to a gateway city (EWR/PHL/MIA/YYZ/YUL) and then nonstop to Portugal, or connect somewhere else in Europe. Personally, I really dislike the eastbound TATL flights. They're rarely over 6, 6.5 hours - too short to sleep, too long to not sleep. You also usually get into LIS at an ungodly hour and get dumped in to an immigration hall full of other arrivals from Africa and South America, resulting in crazy lines. I would rather fly through Frankfurt/Munich/Amsterdam (you can probably schedule up to 24h there as a connection). You'd get into LIS/OPO later, but you have a bit of a longer flight across the pond, which means you can sleep a bit longer.
The other bit of advice that would be very helpful is how to manage the return trip. Most of the transatlantic flights seem to depart at 5:30 am from LIS. One suggestion I received was to fly from LIS to AMS and spend the night near AMS, taking a flight to ABQ the next day. I am not sure about the pros and cons of that route other than that it might be hard to get transport to LIS at 4 am for a 5:30 am flight, not to mention disruptive.
Thank you for any and all advice! I appreciate your taking the time to offer guidance and education to a newbie.
Getting to LIS at any time of the day is not an issue. The airport is in the middle of the city and the 10€ uber will get you there in 10-15 min from anywhere in town. At 4AM there is no traffic to worry about.
Connecting to early TATL flights in AMS/FRA/MUC can sometimes be difficult. You can do what you're suggesting or fly via EWR - these flights leave around noon. FWIW that's what I'd choose.