uk1

I'm suprised it worked that way for you. £1120 for two people should have a fair BA lattitude in it with all of the control.

Whenever I reconstruct a trip I've put together using BA or BMI into some sort of bought package it always seems unaffordable as a package. But it may be that this is only true if you use your FT nouse and are using premium seats rather than Y.

It's probably also just my age, but there is still nothing that replaces the sight of BA or BMI people at the door as against say Lufthansa or Austrian or others on even longer trips.

Swiss Tony

I seriously doubt it. Early January has always been the hardest time for tour operators to sell ski holidays, so given they block book hotels and entire planes for the season they could well be selling at below cost (better for them to get £20 for a seat on a plane and £10 for the same on the coach, compared to it going empty).

I'm off to a well located but what looks like a fairly average 4* hotel in Austria for a ski weekend soon and it's £70 per person, per night for bed & breakfast. We're spending £250 on the flights and EUR425 on transfers. That's £880 excluding dinners for me & the missus. Run that out to a week and you're at £1500. Granted we could shave a bit off the transfers, but even so we're not going to beat the OP's quote.

I guess we can put it this was - he got dinner thrown in whilst we get scheduled flights and a private taxi transfer. That's all time saved for us, but it comes at a price.

uk1

Yes - I hadn't quite seen it that way. I had equated it to around 4 or 5 trips a year to VIE using cash plus miles for C on BMI and Friends and Family rate at the IC.

£1200 would give me two C seats, and a week or so in a suite with full lounge bennies - and a bit towards eating out. It seems a lot to me to pay for a charter to a 4 star even if with HB.

Swiss Tony

I think the crux is that the hotels is ski resorts are as good as sold out for 13 weeks of the year (and that's when we're talking about) and you don't tend to have chain hotels in ski resorts either (with one or two exceptions). A bit like you wouldn't get the aforementioned deal at the IC in Vienna if OPEC happened to be in town at the same time.

Oh, and getting to the SZG area is quite a pain. BA fly 4 or 5 times a week from Gatwick at not exactly the most convenient times, and a C&M redemption to SZG last year in C was about £350 plus a shed load of miles because you have to connect in FRA or VIE.

uk1

As it happens we were there during OPEC last year! On F&F rate. It was a bizarre experience being in the lounge with CNN broadcasting pictures of a chap I was chatting to over wine during happy hour. Most of the people on the news report appeared to be around us in the lounge and my wife and I seemed to be an object of interest as we were the only civilians.

Get the point re skiing resorts.

sigma421

In such cases you may be as well flying to MUC and getting a train.

Swiss Tony

Except it takes a stupid length of time, as SZG itself isn't the final destination - the ski resorts are another hour and a bit away. Am off to Zell am See which has a train station and we're flying into MUC but with one or two exceptions it's a 5hr journey by train versus 2.5hrs in a cab. OK so the cab costs EUR300 versus EUR50pp for the train, but that's a lot of time to lose on a short break.

uk1

On a trip a few years back to SZG when we had flex tickets we found it slightly quicker to train back to MUC than it was to fly back to VIE and then back to LHR. But I guess if SZG isn't the final staging post then it's a bjnd!

PUCCI GALORE

You and I both.

Still - did you fly on one of their Comets? Is that one that had the wings cut off (or knowing Dan Dare charters they may well have fallen off) still at LGW?

That said some of the ex-Dan-Air crew are some of our best.

rathin100

Ghastly that people still do this

I was once put on a Charter in 1994 to a place called Paphos without being told... From Manchester ... It had an airline-like name, Monarch or something, but was a charter.

I've done LCCs in India and they are fine, so are they here in Brazil. Wouldn't do them in Europe they sound terribly crude. Would rather not fly at all.

stifle

I remember an awful charter journey I had from MAN-SFJ (exercise: how many people know where SFJ is without looking it up!), on Excel Airways. Massive check-in queues, ServisAir weighing everyone's hand luggage (max 5kg) and refusing all excess, then delayed three hours due late inbound, then delayed an extra two hours while they got a new crew because the other one would have run out of hours.

Onboard the 757, a bait-and-switch on their customized headsets ensued, with a PA saying the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy would be shown on the overhead screens, and once they had finished selling headsets it turned out it was going to be the Cat in the Hat.

Booze had to be paid for, duty-free was flogged remorselessly, and the crew were less than helpful.

FlyerTalker6245

2011 was the first year I went without a charter flight in over 10 years

2010 at Innsbruck was such chaos. We were taken from our hotel at 06.30 for an 11.25 flight. We arrived at INN at 08.00!

Check in hadn't opened. For ANY airline.

So the 09.30 to Birmingham, and flights before mine to Manchester and London Gatwick hadn't even started checking in. All of them being 757s with 230 passengers...thats 1000 people in Innsbruck's check in hall. Anyone that has been there will know that the inevitable result was queuing outside. In Innsbruck. In Winter.

Never again.

Jimmie76

I had a flight once with the rest of the family where we had bagged ridiculously cheap seats on a charter flight, despite not being on one of their package holidays. After that I decided I was never doing it again even if the rest of the family were doing it. The charter terminal at LYS (Lyon Satolas now Lyon-Saint Exupéry) was built for the Winter Olympics and is horrible.

meester69

Well you pay your money and you take your choice I guess. The LCC can often be £500 cheaper for a 1 1/2 hour flight for a family of 4, ok there's no lounge access or food on board but for most people the £500 is far more relevant.

For me if I was doing one of these charter type holidays, off to southern Spain or whatever, I'd certainly take the LCC if the saving was sufficient, get to the airport an hour before take-off and it's really not that bad.

EZY are pretty decent all considered, but I'd avoid Ryanair at almost any cost, although I suppose even them I might consider if they were the most convenient option (which I very much doubt, but it could happen).

meester69

That was your mistake. All of these mass transportation services *aim* to get you to the airport 3 hours early. In reality, it might be even earlier than that. But it's no surprise, you wouldn't want an entire coachful of tourists being late to check-in.

By all means book the charter flight, take the LCC, go on the package holiday, BUT for god's sake sort your own transport out, whether it be a taxi, a rental car, public transport, but not, under any circumstances, do you want to be on a bloody package coach.

The package coach is the cause of at least half of all package holiday unpleasantness.

What's wrong with it? First thing is you get off the flight at about 9pm, tear through immigration, get your bags, and then? You wait for all the other passengers to -very slowly- do the same. This takes over an hour from landin.

Then the bus, being gigantic, is limited to about 50mph, and actually goes much slower. Eventually you make it to your resort, but wait - it's not yours! It's the first of thirteen stops and yours, an hour later, is dead last.

By the time you make it to your hotel it's midnight, and that delicious dinner buffet included with your package is long since over. Oops. You make it to bed at 1am in a foul mood.

A week or two later, it's time to go home, and your tour rep informs you that your pickup time is 11am. What???? The return flight is not until 4pm, why are you being deprived of your delicious lunch and pool time? That's because you are first pickup, it will therefore take 2 hours to get to the airport, where you will arrive 3 hours early for the convenience of the tour operator - not your own. The airport is of course a charter hellhole, crowded with fractious children, limited, overpriced food, and the queue to check-in takes an hour and a half.

How it could have gone? You book your private taxi for £30 each way, never mind that the bus is included with your package, just because it's free doesn't mean it's worth using, you get to the hotel on arrival promptly in time for dinner, with someone waiting with your name on it, and you enjoy an extra 3 hours by the pool and eating lunch in the resort, instead of in a horrible bus/airport.