ranskis

A few years ago, I flew MAD BCN via ATH on a single A3 fare component

KLouis

At about the time you were posting this I was attending a seminar by a colleague on dependencies and what physicians can offer to get rid of them. The list of dependencies included all possible kinds of drugs plus, of course, tobacco and alcohol, as well as behavioural dependencies such as Internet, pornography, TV, etc. I'll have to tell him, when I see him again on Friday, to add flying to the list! How else could one describe spending 8-9 hours in an airplane plus airport instead of 2 (that includes one hour for pre-boarding activities and waiting).

GBobon

2 years ago I flew from Constanta (Romanian seaside) to Bucharest via Varna and Istanbul with THY... while the distance between Constanta and Bucharest is only 220km on highway
another stupid but awesome trip: OTP - SXF/TXL-BCN-CMN-YUL-CMN-BCN-OTP in 50 hours (last commercial flight for RAM B747)

RedChili

Reminds me of something that I did a number of years ago. I simply had to get from Novosibirsk to Irkutsk on a certain day, no flights were available, and all trains were fully booked. So, instead of flying 792nm non-stop, I had to fly on two separate tickets with S7 1,509nm OVB-DME, transfer by bus to SVO, and with SU 2,281nm SVO-IKT. The whole journey took around 21 hours instead of 2 hours.

:D!

In the past people wanting to travel from the PRC to Taiwan had to fly via Hong Kong which added at least 4 hours on a roundtrip, depending on where exactly you started.

Over on the BA forum (and sometimes on the CX forum) people often fly something like LHR-AMS-LHR or HKG-TPE-HKG without even leaving the airport, so a completely futile trip requiring about 5 hours. When arriving at LHR they immediately transfer to a long-haul flight. The total cost of doing this may be half or less than half the price of just flying the long-haul flight, so it can be worth it. When I do it, I spend the day in the European city then go home, and fly the long-haul the next day, so I see it as a "free" day trip plus a good fare for a flat bed on a 12-hour flight.

A more extreme example was seen with the ex-CAI fares, so starting from LHR you'd spend 8 hours in Euro-Business class just to get a flat bed on a 7 hour flight to JFK. Though I suppose this accrued lots of BA tier points, and there were also good fares to places like HNL.

Unfortunately A3 has no long-haul flights so MAD-ATH-BCN is probably the craziest routing you can do, when you actually need to go somewhere. Well, if you have 18K miles and two A3 flights, and you need to travel from Madrid to Barcelona as well as renew your *G, and A3 is offering a cheap ticket, it makes sense to book that ticket.

The craziest idea I've heard of is people paying a few hundred $/€/£ to do something like DOH-MCT-DOH in F, but they don't actually want to go to Muscat, they just want to visit the Al-Safwa lounge in DOH.

ranskis

Actually I spent one evening and a night in Athens, to enjoy some good taverna and bouzouki, Athens was my cheap week-end destination and I had to be in BCN the following week.
All upgraded with coupons at the time PUT light fares were eligible if I remember correctly, collecting 2 A3 segments and lots of miles. Much cheaper than the AVE train in tourist class

GBobon

BA is using widebody or ex-bmi A321s with flatbeds to CAI.

they book flex tickets and cancel them later on

miklcct

Couldn't you short-ticket a train, and pay the fare difference on board? This is the strategy for people who need to travel on fully-booked train in China.

RedChili

I'm not sure what you mean by short-ticketing a train. Many trains that travel on the Trans-Siberian railroad only have beds on board, no seats, since the journey often lasts 3-7 days. And if all beds are fully booked, the train is full. They don't allow standing passengers for 24 hours.

My problem was exacerbated because I traveled around 1 February. Some trains only operate every second day, either or even dates or on odd dates. So, when you have two even dates in a row (31 January - 1 February), some trains are simply cancelled, so there are fewer trains to choose between.

miklcct

Short-ticketing a train means, when you want to travel the section B-C-D-E-F on a line, but it has been sold out, you buy a ticket departing from B to, for example, C if available. Then at station C, you tell the conductor on board you want to continue to travel to F and pay the fare difference, plus a little surcharge. This is the most common method used in China to get on full trains. In this case, you won't get a seat between C and F.

Most trains in China allow overloading to a certain extent, especially on the slow trains where weight limitation is not a problem. On especially popular routes, you can see the trains are fully packed with standing passengers because of this reason. However some newer trains with faster speed aren't designed to overload, so when it is overloaded too much, the train will refuse to run, on these trains the conductor may refuse request to supplement the ticket and force you to get off the train. Therefore if you want to guarantee travel, you need to avoid these kinds of fast trains.

If I were you even though I can't buy a train ticket directly to the destination, I will buy a train ticket as far as possible along the route, such that I will be at a better position than the origin, then if I can't take the train, use any other means of transportation in the correct direction to the destination including waiting for the next train (assuming it is a major rail corridor), take an aeroplane, take a bus, or even a taxi or attempt to hitchhike along the major national road.

For OVB-IKT, if a direct flight is not available, I will fly to KJA first, then use whatever method to IKT, or even fly to UUD.

RedChili

As I explained above, on the Trans-Siberian railroad, some trains have only beds, no seats, and standing is not allowed. So, if all beds are taken, you won't be allowed to board the train for any destination at all. And this problem is exacerbated at certain dates when some trains are cancelled, such as when you have two odd dates in a row. And that was the case when I was traveling. There were 0 beds available on that date for travel eastward from Novosibirsk. So, a train was not an option anywhere at all.

As far as I can remember, there were no flights at all on OVB-KJA at that time (this was a number of years ago).

UUD was not an option at all. They only had a handful of flights there. They had an airline called Bargouzin which had a single Tu-134, RA-65560. I actually survived seven flights in that plane. They had a flight one or two days per week operating UUD-IKT-OVB-GOJ. They had another flight UUD-IKT-YKS. Basically, all of their flights from UUD stopped in IKT on the way. So, the only available flight from OVB to UUD at that time actually stopped in IKT on the way, but only on one or two days per week.

It's almost 2,000 kilometers from Novosibirsk to Irkutsk, so going by bus would take several days. I would probably have to change bus at least five or six times en route. Even a private car would take 24 hours (according to Google maps).

I don't think you understand what kind of distances are involved in Siberia, or how sparsely populated the region is. The train, which is by far the fastest ground transportation, takes at least 30 hours from Novosibirsk to Irkutsk. Nobody would ever even think of taking buses or taxis on such routes. A taxi driver would basically have to be away from home for four days: two days to go there with 12 hours of driving per day, and two days back again with 12 hours on the road per day. Can you imagine how much such a trip would cost? Buses would be much cheaper, of course, but also far more time consuming. You would probably have to spend 10-12 hours on the bus every day for a week. Not really an option when you have an appointment in about 35 hours.

So, the only option was actually through Moscow. But I made a mistake above. I wrote that I flew OVB-DME, but it was actually OVB-VKO on an S7 Tu-154, and then SVO-IKT on an SU Il-62.

:D!

Hitchhiking in Siberia in February is an inane suggestion when there was a perfectly good flight route via Moscow. I would have even tried to transit through somewhere like Kyrgyzstan or Vietnam if the times worked out, before considering other surface transport when the train is full.

miklcct

Transiting through Kazakhstan or Mongolia is far far far better than going through Moscow and I will try these before going a detour in the opposite direction. The shorter the air miles flown, the better the transit route.

P.S. based on the experience you have given, I will not consider trans-Siberian Railway to travel around Russia, and will not attempt to plan a trip which runs along the length of the railway, unless overloading and seating are allowed on the trains. (as my preferred way of travel is to take a short section of a railway, get off and tour around a city, then hop on the next train to the next city, etc.)

BTW, 2000 km is about the length from Shenzhen to Beijing, and an overnight sleeper high-speed train takes about 10 hours on the high speed railway, while a slow train on the conventional railway takes about 24 hours. If the sleeper train is sold out, I will make transfers at intermediate cities along the route.

RedChili

Transiting through Kazakhstan or Mongolia? I'm sorry to say so, but your suggestions are getting wilder and wilder. At that time, I would have needed visas for both those countries. How do you obtain such a visa in five minutes late at night in the middle of Siberia? Also, going from Novosibirsk to Mongolia would normally be done by train, and, you guessed it, that train is passing through Irkutsk on the way to Mongolia. It's just twice as far. So you would attempt to get a visa for Mongolia, and then take a train three days from Novosibirsk through Irkutsk to Mongolia, in order to take a train for one day again back to Irkutsk? This plan would take at least a week to accomplish. Going through Kazakhstan would be the opposite way of Irkutsk. Again, it would probably take a week. Would you ever consider going via Burma or Mongolia if there were no trains available from Shezhen to Beijing?

The Trans-Siberian railway is the absolutely best way of traveling through Russia. I've made a three figure number of trips on Russian trains, and I can only remember a single instance when all trains were full and I could't find a ticket. Russian trains are comfortable, scenic, social, and the trains have frequent long stops so that you can get out and buy food at the main stations. But you can't buy one ticket for the entire journey and hop on and off as you please. Each leg needs its own ticket. But today, you can buy those tickets on the Internet, so it's perfectly fine to plan a trip where you get off in each major city and switch to another train a few hours later. All trains have cars with beds. A few trains have a class called "obshi," where passengers sit, but they sit on beds and not in comfortable chairs, so it's a horrible experience, and I never traveled with that class. But all these classes need a ticket with a bed/seat reservation before boarding.

The only type of train that allows travel without seat reservation is an elektritchka. They are commuter trains, have hard wooden seats, and there are no lavatories on board. In my experience, they travel up to 150 km or four hours around the main cities, but there are frequent stops, so it's not a quick way of moving around. If you want to go from Novosibirsk to Krasnoyarsk by elektritchka, I would guess that you could take one of those trains for the first and last 150 km of the trip, but there would be no eletrichka for the 500 km in between. In Russia, nobody would even think of traveling with an elektritchka over those distances.

miklcct

Your experience of trans-siberian railway being full means that the trans-siberian railway is not a reliable method for travelling in Russia, unless there is an elektrichka connecting every segment along the route which can be used to bypass fully-booked sections.

Multiple train tickets are not a problem. The problem is when I need to travel there is no availability on multiple consecutive departures, which will definitely lead to missing deadlines. This happens a lot of time in my place I live. Some places are only served by 16-seat minibuses which strictly prohibit standing passengers, and on some popular routes, multiple full minibuses pass through without anyone getting off, causing commuters to be late on work. Therefore these kind of transport are to be avoided.