Originally Posted by
CathayMVP
Hi, anyone have any experience doing same day turnarounds mileage runs?
Rn I am booked AS 340 and AS 337 (SFO-EWR; EWR-SFO) as 2 separate bookings since it is under the MCT I believe for Newark airport. Cannot book it on the Alaska flight. I have my mileage plan attached to the first flight to Newark. I was planning on adding my mileage plan number a day before the flight to SDC to AS 393 (EWR-LAX) and AS 3930 (LAX-SFO) which will put me into a proper MCT, and is bookable on the website.
Are there any flaws to this? I don't want Alaska to clear my bookings as illegal bookings because that would be unfortunate.
I also saw to get to EWR that same day, there is an option to go through LAX (AS 3318 and 548). If I were to go from SFO-LAX-EWR-LAX-SFO, that would be ideal as I would get a decent chunk of EQM that would get me closer to 75k, however, the MCT would not be met as it would be 55min at EWR. Of course, I would not be checking in a bag or anything so I would stay airside. It seems as if they use the same aircraft but I cannot tell if it is the same aircraft.
AS does rotate aircraft at East Coast terminals. Currently some aircraft route, for example, LAX-JFK-SEA or SFO-JFK-LAX. You can check the current operating pattern by looking at
FlightAware - Flight Tracker / Flight Status at your flight today or tomorrow and clicking on "where is my plane now" and you will see what the turn is. However, there is no assurance that the rotation won't change in the future, or on a particular day. For example, I once did a sameday mile run to BOS, and generally the aircraft were scheduled to return to their origin, but on my date AS swapped the SEA and PDX aircraft at BOS, even though it meant a delay for one of the flights. (I assume that they did this because they planned maintenance on one of the aircraft and needed it somewhere.) They will not swap between A321's and 737's and they generally won't swap between 738's and 739's - so if you can look at the schedule, you may be able to narrow down what operations are likely to be. It looks like AS is currently operating 738's from SAN, SFO, and LAX to EWR, and 739's from SEA and PDX. They do have two or three gates at EWR so it's entirely possible that they have overlapping arrivals and departures.
If you are booked on separate reservations (separate PNRs or confirmation code) Alaska's IT won't do anything to cancel your reservation - it will just be at your risk in the event the your inbound flight is late and another aircraft operates the outbound. While usually if there are ATC or weather delays then both aircraft would be delayed, that doesn't always work out that way in practice. If that were to happen, I expect that AS would rebook you, either same flight the following day, or if you are lucky and they still have flights headed to the West Coast that haven't departed, on any West Coast departure with a connection back (might be the following day.)