maalloc

The airport indeed has two codes, but the MLH CDG route does not exist anyway so your chance of booking it is quite low AF only markets BSL CDG.

canadavid

Nice Business fares from France to Europe (from 400€ to 500€)
For instance NTE-MRS-CDG-LIS and return for 420€ and 108xp (or 116 if you hold the abonnée card)= 3,62€/xp.

Portugal is without quarantine restriction for French residents.




From GVA, there are also a lot of 455€ for same day turnaround and 120xp

franssois69

Thank you Goldorak and other
Anyway price is much much higher from Basel ( if you compare with GVA by example )

Maybe Lisbon can be a good idea .. But i can't find the plan for a one day roundtrip ..

Concerto

Depends where your final destination is from Basel. I found Stockholm is much cheaper starting from BSL than GVA.

Now I have had even more work cancelled I have less need to travel like this, but more time to do so.

EDIT - not seeing any deals at semi reasonable prices to Linköping for the first weekend of November. Maybe availability has already dried up, or maybe there are less flights because of ongoing Covid. I guess I'll have to take the plunge and book one of these soon, although I would rather wait and see how things develop.

Wil973

same for me... need to book a 120xp run from bsl around 400 euros...
but the best i can find is bcn but awful schedule for 400

offvoice

GVA-LPI with double stopover available at EUR 611 mid-November over a weekend. Same price from LHR. Unless I’m wrong, KLM decreased its frequency to LPI from 2 to 1 per day, hence the more scarce availability (I guess). On the + side, inbound lands sooner and gives you a bit of time to explore the city (arrives 6:10pm instead of previous 10:45pm).

Note: unless you book The Box hotel for your stay (20 min walk from the airport), do book a cab if you’re taking the 6am flight from LPI before your trip. Same day booking very hard.

Concerto

That's great and totally acceptable. But I wasn't seeing it on the Air France website. Would it be ok to book this through an OTA, do you think? Would also be ready to start from Italy.

EDIT - looking at Momondo, which farms me out to lastminute.de or bravofly, it comes as low as €527 from MIL, €543 from GVA. But they seem to offer a basic option in their packages where you pay for changes, and a premium option where modifications are free which prices out at €630.
Oddly, I can get everything under AF numbers except the flight into LPI from AMS. It seems to me that having the whole thing under AF numbers is the key to getting it cheaper. Not sure how to force that.

gkl

booking through OTA is ok. I did this myself and can confirm that I received double XP for OTA-bookings, however given the uncertainty during these times, I personally would only book through OTA when the departure is within one week and I'm sure that I will use these flights. When you want to change the booking or have to deal with cancellations, OTAs will likely be a horrible experience.
I used the multi-city search on AF.com to force some 2-stop connections, such as looking for MXP-CDG, CDG-KRK (which shows me the 1-stop option CDG-AMS-KRK), KRK-CDG, CDG-MXP.

flying_blue_white_red

Using Misterfly.com allows you to change it directly via mmb on AF.com or KL.com,
Even over the phone, AF customer service could change the booking without problem.
Of course for other OTAs, it might be a very different story.

Concerto

Lastminute.com got quite a bad press yesterday, where one article that I read stated that they have been continually delaying refunds or refusing to pay them. Usual story, forcing people to take vouchers.

What I don't understand is this two tier price that lastminute and bravofly are offering for the same product (Business), one basic, the other premium offering free changes. Or maybe it's momondo that is offering it, because it is through their site that I made the search. Frankly, €527-543 is really not bad at all, but I reckon if I leave it until 1 week before departure there won't be any prices like that.

Concerto

I don't know how anyone can use the Air France website for this flight - c'est pire que nul. It forces you to use the OTAs, or just give up totally. I'm just amazed we've reached the year 2020 and the major airlines still have websites like this - it defies belief.

I don't know what you guys think, but it's getting pretty bad out there and I'm not sure inessential trips are the best thing to do at the moment. This, despite the current double XPs promotion. I think there's a good chance, if the airlines don't hit total bankruptcy, they will throw some good offers at us next year and hopefully this thing will be calming down by then.

maalloc

IMHO bankruptcy is a serious consideration these days.
It adds a bit of randomness to all these mileage runs. Aside from Flying Blue rules change, what good is it to rack up XP if AFKL could go out of business within 6 months?

Digicola

Agreed, I've actually found that its gotten worse since the overhaul occured a year ago. Before the multi city tool was very flexible as you could get it show you multiple pages of routing options (different airlines, different codes etc) and build your itinerary as you pleased. Now it only shows you very few options... AF is trying to funnel you into the few options available (when they are) and charge you a premium for it.

The lowest I've seen for intra EU runs is 530€, thats over 100€ more than what some OTA's offer. But then again, would you rather deal with the PSL or an OTA in case of a cancellation...

Concerto

I'd rather deal with neither, I just think I'm going to be off the map for all of this for quite some time.
Even then, work opportunities might take years to come back to pre Covid levels and I don't fancy going through the whole status thing all over again. If I go out from this, I'm staying out and just going with cheapest and best routings in the future. Sounds like a cop out, but I reckon I won't have much choice realistically.

As for bankruptcy, I have maintained from the beginning (perhaps not too vocally here, but if yes, then my apologies) that a total reset could be a good thing. We need something new and adapted to the 2000s onward and not something still basically lodged in the 1950s. The whole air travel world needs to re-evaluated including, obviously, the whole climate thing but also the impact of endless mass tourism.

Talking about bankruptcies, and very much concerning mileage runs for XPs, it seems that the last call has finally sounded for Alitalia. That is a real shame not only because of cheap XP runs, but also because I quite like Alitalia. I can tell you, whatever they put in its place will not last for long, I can just feel it.

Concerto

Just been checking some other routes because of a sudden need and I noticed that GVA-LJU for example is hovering around the EUR400 mark. That seems pretty reasonable to me, for business class. That would have been an economy fare not so very long ago (although my concept of time is probably more related to the date of the death of Beethoven rather than something in the airline industry, where a century is the equivalent of 5 normal years).

The danger with these routes to places like LJU is with cancellations. Already, LJU seems to have been reduced from about 15 flights a week (at a rough estimate) to about 3. And here in Switzerland we are sitting on the tipping point, I reckon, of another lockdown of sorts.