orbitmic

Another regular member of this board (he/she will name him/herself later if he/she wants! ) and myself were chatting yesterday about flying patterns and sort of wondered what our board members tend to fly. So thinking back about the year from 1/9/2011 to 31/8/2012, on the whole, how many flights (segments) have you taken, which proportion with AF-KL, with other Skyteam airlines, and with non-Skyteam airlines? And what proportions in Y/Y+ vs J/P? This is meant to be informative, not a 'competition', so please no need to inflate, etc, it's just being curious and thinking of our combined benchmarking potential If anyone prefers an 'anonymous' post, feel free to send me a PM and I'll repost as 'anonymous'! OK, I'll start:

Total flights: 209
Including:
AF-KL: 41
Other Skyteam: 44 (AZ, DL, CI, SU, OK, AM - will try MU later this year!)
Non-Skyteam: 124 (BA, U2, FR, LH, LX, QF, SQ, EK, NZ, BD, EC, EI, TK, A3, AC, AA, SN, OS, DJ, UA, US)

Short and medium haul mostly in Y and long haul mostly in J.

(And yes, before anyone asks, I do keep a spreadsheet of my flights and copies of my boarding cards! )

Cupart

I'm way out of your league here (or rather out of most peoples league in here) so I won't be able to give any valuable input.

One question though: Total flights? Are these segments or return flights?

orbitmic

No, no - again, it's not a competition, so even someone flying 5 flights a year IS a valuable input. And it is indeed segments so you see you might already have more than you thought!

B66

Here's my L12M :

Segments SH/MH LH Total

AF-KL 17 8 25
Other Skyteam 5 4 9
Other 6 0 6

Total 28 12 40

SH/MH = economy, LH = mostly C.

First flight spreadsheet ever ! ;-)

saraoutou

44 Flights (only 6 LH, 2 MH)

most in Y (3 in J , no surprise at check-in)

ST 34

-15 YS for AF
-12 AF (unfortunately 4 of them are Tgv).

- 2 KL

- 4 AZ

- 1 UX (J)

Non ST: 10

- 1 IB, 1 I2, 2 VY (all marketed by IB). (place not easily reachable by ST)

- 2 GL (unpossible to get there otherwise)

And don't shoot me...

- 2FR (Every 4-5 years I need a booster injection).

Henry III

For me, the past 12 months' flying pattern is a bit atypical (few l/h, many domestics):

Total Flights = 71 (27 Domestic*, 42 European, 2 Long-Haul);

Airline Breakdown:

KL = 32
AF = 21
UX = 6
BE = 5**
G3 = 3
U2 = 2
BA = 2***

-- Henry

* Includes all flights within a single country (not necessarily the UK)
** All these BE flights were actually booked on AF stock
*** No BA flight booked: redirected by KL (GLA-LHR-BUD) due to fog at AMS

thierry

Since January 1st I flew 124 sectors : 29 on Skyteam
31 on Oneworld
36 on Star
28 non aligned

Skyteam: on AF ( 13 SH in Y, 2 SH in W, 2 in J)
2 LH in Y, 1 LH in J)
on KL ( 5 SH in Y )
on VN ( 2 SH in Y )
on SU ( 1 SH in Y )
on DL ( 1 LH in J )

Oneworld n AA ( 2 SH in F, 4 MH in F, 7 LH in J and 2 in F )
on AS ( 2 SH in Y )
on BA ( 3 SH in Y, 1 LH in Y, 1 LH in W, 1 LH in J )
on QF ( 2 SH in Y )
on RJ ( 2 MH in J, 2 LH in J )
on CX ( 1 MH in J, 1 MH in F )

Star : on LH ( 2 SH in Y, 6 SH in J, 3 LH in J )
on UA ( 4 LH in J )
on AC ( 1 LH in J )
on LX ( 5 SH in J, 4 LH in J, 1 LH in F)
on TG ( 5 SH in J, 1 LH in J )
on TK ( 1 LH in J, 1 MH in J )
on TP ( 2 SH in Y )

Non aligned : VX 1 SH in F
AR 7 SH in Y, 3 MH in Y, 4 LH in Y
QR 4 LH in J
U8 2 MH in Y
VY 2 SH in Y
HA 3 SH in Y
PG 2 SH in Y
EK 4 LH in F


Here is the pattern which explain why I am Elite in all three alliances.

San Gottardo

I typically do around 260-280 segments per year. I am too lazy to pull the numbers from the spreadsheet, but I have started using openflights, so I can give the following statistics, from January to September 7:

Segments 183
Distance 289'650 km (7.23x around the world, 75% of the distance to the moon) (NB: distance as calculated by the website)

Classes of travel
About 2/3 of my flights are in Business
Another 15-20% in First
The rest in Eco or Premium Voyageur

Airports most often flown from/to:
Paris CDG - 90 flights ( 49% of flights)
Zurich - 75 times (40% of flights)

Airlines - by segments:
Swiss - 67 flights (37% of flights)
Lufthansa - 27 flights (14%)
Air France - 23 flights (12%)
Qatar Airways - 19 flights (10%)
Emirates - 16 flights (9%)
Less than 10 flights: ME, US, BA, KL, HG, DL, EI, OS, TK, UA, Loganair

Airlines - by distance:
Swiss - 94'895 km (33%)
Emirates - 52'220 km (18%)
Air France - 38'362 km (13%)
Qatar Airways - 37'459 km (13%)
Lufthansa - 36'706 km (13%)
MEA - 11'967 km (4%)
Delta - 7'981 km (3%)

To be honest this is the first time I look at these figures myself and I am almost surprised about the results. But I start understanding:

This is an "unusual" year. I flew a lot to the Middle East over the past couple of months, 1-2 times return every week. Because of scheduling constraints I often ended up on EK and QR and they ended up growing on me. Still I didn't have the impression that I did so many trips on Qatar Airways, although admittedly many of them are short hops DOH-DXB-DOH. In previous years I went to North America much more and also had some Asian trips, and in Europe I went to Germany much more often. Many of the US and almost all of the Germany trips were on Lufthansa, so Lufthansa had a higher share. The Air France share is slightly higher in terms of distance than in previous years because I did a couple of longhauls.

The other thing interesting to observe is to what extent airlines succeed in catching me at the airports where I am captive, Paris and Zurich: I do 40% of my flights from/to Zurich. Swiss, the local carrier, gets 37% of my flights, so 92% "share of wallet" (and probably a little higher if I count the flights ticketed on LX but operated by LH). On the other hand, 49% of my flights are from/to Paris, but the local carrier Air France only gets 12% of my flights, so just 24% "share of wallet". Quite telling.

freretuc

For me for the last 12 months:

24 segments
Long haul = 15 14 x AF mostly in Y/W + 1 x AC en J
medium haul (Y) = 2 1 x AF + 1 x DL
short haul (Y) = 7 1 x AA+ 2 x AF + 2 x DL + 1 x AC + 1 x WS

Edit: when i see some stats, i am thinking that I need to review my spreadsheet to be more detailed !

KLflyerRalph

I feel odd.

Total flights: 10
(AF)KL: 2 (Cityjet)
Other Skyteam: 2 (CI)
Non-Skyteam: 6 (2 PG, 2 SN, 2 HV)

2 Domestic.
4 European.
2 Medium-haul.
2 Long-haul.

All are segments. In total for me, quite a lot flights ha!
I keep my data on flightmemory.com.

All in whY of course.

orbitmic

People this is all great stuff! Please continue contributing. There are a few fora I contribute regularly to. One of the things that is amazing about the AF KL one is well-illustrated by the patterns reported above: the incredible diversity of experiences that we collectively have in mind: after only the first 8 people answered, we cover every possible class of travel, pretty much every flight length and world area, and already over 50 different airlines. In fact, I would consider myself rather knowledgeable about the airline world and I'll confess that I had to look up quite a few airline codes I had never heard of before like U8 and G3! I think that large proportions of frequent flyers may only tend to always fly the same or two or three different airlines, and I dare say that this is one of the most 'air educated' crowd one could possibly think of.

PS: San Gottardo, as I said this is no competition etc but your figures are humbling - I know how tired I feel already when I have my series of back to back trips and seeing that you take about 30% more trips than me yet I can only imagine that there are times when you must be totally exhausted. I was lucky enough to have nearly a full month without a flight at one point this summer and while I still absolutely love flying, this was just a fabulous treat! Hope you still get to do the same from time to time!

KLflyerRalph, nice to see there has been another CI guinea pig out here! I really liked my experience with them (had a 'vip moment' that was really surprising and found the whole CI experience quite charming), hope you enjoyed it too!

KLflyerRalph

CI was absolutely fantastic on this particular trip. Most comfortable flight ever (ok, with only some 40 total flights in my life, not the most representative but anyways) for me. Mainly due to exitrow seats and a fruit meal. The difference these two make... And the fact that they were free: ^^^
FA's definitely could use some English classes though!
I also had kind of a VIP moment and they teased me with lounge access at AMS, but at the CL 'access denied' .

I'm currently working on a TR but that is really so much work, I doubt I will ever complete it!

San Gottardo

Fantastic thread! Thanks a lot orbitmic for this fabulous idea. And now I know whom to turn to if I want insights/comparisons with some of these very exotic airlines.

I think from a certain number of flights onward (>50 pa) and especially if flying always the same airlines and airports one gets just very experienced and it becomes part of a routine like going to the supermarket or taking a cab. And I am convinced there are many people here on the AFKL forum that do that sort of flying. Personally I am somewhat split about my flying:

• I don't "realize" 70% of my flights, I go to the airport, to the lounge, on board, arrive, leave the airport, and 5 minutes later I have already forgotten about it. Eventless
• I love 20% of my flights because they are a real trip, to a place I rarely go, because of the great scenery (there have been four hour long flights where I was "scotched" to the window for the entire time), because I got a jumpseat ride in the cockpit, because of the crew - that kind of thing
• I hate 10% of my flights, when something goes badly wrong and people who could do something about fixing the problem are unwilling or under-trained to do it, because of comfort dropping to a level which annoys me and is not on par with what could be expected

I had period of almost 2 weeks this summer without any checking in and going on board. Guess what I did? I flew myself, as a pilot in my little Cessna. That beats *any" lie flat seat, Champagne, or status match. If I could I'd do more of this flying and less of the "I fly because I need to be somewhere else in x hours". I don't do more passenger flights than I need to just because I love flying, but I think loving aviation makes it more bearable.

orbitmic

I'll keep my comment regarding the entire post short: ^

Q-STO

Very interesting thread - for which I give my humble contribution

Total segments since Jan 1st, 2012: 84 - of which:
AF 49
LX 20
UX 14
VY 01

Domestic segments 5 (*) / International segments 79

Most flown route: CDG-ZRH (65% of all segments)

Cabin flown: 100% Y - due to strong budget restrictions

(*): I have counted my flights to/from Basel-Mulhouse as domestic segments (ORY-MLH and not BSL)