Showing my complete ignorance here, but I thought you needed access to expert flyer to work out taxes?:confused:

No. You can find the answer by trying to replicate the booking on the likes of Ebookers or Expedia and looking at the tax and fuel surcharges breakdown on the fare.

For a trip to NRT, £305 sounds about right thanks to the APD, plus the fuel (YQ) charges. As I say, plug it in to Expedia etc to check.

With respect, I think you've been around FT and this forum long enough to know that you can find out what the tax for yourself by simply trying a dummy booking on the route, using the likes of ITA or other programs that FT'ers have written; links to which are even in the forum.....

Sticky: READ THE FIRST: bmi Diamond Club : FAQs......

ahhh, never thought of doing it that way! checked on the LH website and I get £304.71, so right enough!

FlyingOnceMore - Your right, I should have known better

Thanks

depending on the connection....
I just checked now random date and LH flight EDI-FRA-NRT and taxes come up as:
LH YQ surcharge (YQ) £128.10
German Passenger Service Charge (RA) £15.20
United Kingdom Air Passengers Duty (GB) £75.00
United Kingdom Passenger Service Charge (UB) £11.31

so around £220

you can check for yourself - http://matrix.itasoftware.com

But did you remember to check for business class? If you did, you wouldn't find it coming in at £75 for the APD. Circa £300 is correct.

I've recently learned that I need to get from LHR to PDX around 24 June 2011 returning around 9 July 2011. My dates are flexible a couple of days either way.

I've used ANA to check availability for lots of different routes after having consulted the *A website and there is zero availability in J. I guess this is due to my dates falling in US school holidays?

With this being such a busy period for travel, do airlines typically make the odd spare seat available nearer the time? Or, am I really asking how long a piece of string is???

I've not tried checking for you, but the problem is most likely to be a lack of award availability to PDX from international gateways, not availability across the Atlantic. You may need to take the final leg from SEA, YVR, SFO or further afield to PDX on a Y award or paid ticket. With your flexibility on dates, you should be okay.

I didn't really want to open a new topic about this, which is why I post it here.

Is it me or is SQ extremely picky this year around with C availability? I could swear last year around Feb/Mar I had no trouble finding C seats AMS-SIN/CPH-SIN (old 772), this year out no availability whatsoever in August, not even in Y :confused:. Anyone else experienced this?

Yeah SQ availability has gone down the drain in the last year. Have you tried calling DC as sometimes they can book SQ even though ANA shows that the flight is not available!

I seem to be having some issues with ICC not being able to find availability for TG 350 days out (booking blind). Also, ANA and Aeroplan don't appear to be working with errors "Sorry, the requested itinerary can't be booked online" and "There are no direct or connecting flights"..

Is there some sort of system problem?

I think award bookings can only be made 330 days in advance.

This thread on "How far in advance can you book Award seats, and when are they released?" (and the Excel table that JONNYBOY will take you to from there) are useful resources.

Yep - to no avail unfortunately.

In my rush to dance around the room and post my successful redemptions on the 2011 redemptions thread I forgot to come back here and thank IMH, msmorley et al for the kind advice. I'm just a few days away from the following flights...

US723 DUB-PHL / US967 PHL-SFO in Y; 22,500 miles and £46.40 taxes
NZ2 LAX-LHR in J / BD6 LHR-GLA in Y+; 33,750 miles and £15.20 taxes

Thank you everyone who has helped me with enquiries in recent months, this is the trip I've been looking forward to ^