NW Special Web Fares
 

Here is what I got from NW today. Hope some of you can use it.

Sale fares to Europe exclusively for Weekly Deals & News subscribers

Northwest Airlines is offering great roundtrip fares to London, Frankfurt or Paris starting at $315* roundtrip, exclusively for our valued Weekly Deals & News subscribers. These low fares must be purchased on nwa.com by August 16, 2004, and are available for travel November 1, 2004 through February 28, 2005. You will need to enter your WorldPerks number in the E-Cert field and PI059 as your Reference Code to price this exclusive offer. Hurry, book your trip today!

http://www.nwa.com/cgi-bin/weeklyoff...53&link=020202

I just priced MEM-LON for Nov.24-30 and got $424. This is about $100 less than regular price.

A question for those who have received PD certs from Valpak -- Are these sale fares as cheap as using the PD cert? I haven't seen the certs yet in my area, but if this is as cheap as the certs, maybe I'll book a flight to Frankfurt for this winter.

Move or wait?
 

I got $597 for a 12/31- 1/7 trip that I have to make. I gotta' think these fares are going to drop in the Fall. $597 seems a bit steep.

T

I retried it without this certificate and tried my PD896 and got $50 off of the fair to $547. So, maybe my $597 wasn't much of a discount or there were some hidden restrictions of which I wasn't aware.

I checked GRR - Paris over Thanksgiven and the price was still $517.00. GRR-DTW-PAR. But I also says a GRR-DTW-AMS-PAR for about $525.00 Doesen't seem like a great deal! I hope to see better fares in the next month.

Yeah - there are airfare+hotel packages out there on travelzoo and the likje already that are a lot cheaper than just this airfare. I'm holding off until after labor day to buy anything in the hopes that all of the fall/winter sales will come out then (according to what other MR FTers have told me).

peace,
~Ben~

None of the fares mentioned here seems like much of a bargain, and to answer a specific question, the ValPak codes are no bargain to Europe either.

Forget using these certs thru the end of October. NWA no longer includes any of the tax/airport/security charges in the prices printed on the cert. When these are included, Europe from Zone A is about $710, from Zone B $760, from Zone C, 810! As my flatmate during my London days would have put it, Bollocks.

The ValPak fares drop $200 from each zone from Nov. 1 - Jan. 31, so is that a bargain? FTer bublik mentioned getting a $424 fare Memphis-London Nov.24-30, so I ran the numbers for that booking with a PD935. From Zone A Memphis, the fare is now $508 with the PD, $517 without. From Zone B Minneapolis, NWA has its own "special fare" code squatting in the fare designator box at $551 and nothing changes when you enter the PD. Ditto from Zone C San Francisco, where the "special" is $541 and nwa.com ignores the PD.

I changed the dates to Jan. 24-30 and got higher fares on searches without the cert. MEM is $547 (cert fixed at $508). MSP is $581, and this time the PD is accepted at $548. SFO is $571, and the website still refuses to give a PD price.

By the way, all these searches were to LON and all got Gatwick, the NWA destination. KLM and the more convenient Heathrow are out of the picture. The PD makes no difference or very little; its fixed prices might save more on the more obscure European routes, but they're still expensive for the time of year.

The bottom line, I think, is that these are just sticker prices and buying European tix now, well ahead of the trip, is about as about as smart as agreeing to the first price quoted by a car salesman! When reality sets in (empty seats and competition to fill them) we'll see the usual fares around $400 by mid-October, and not much over $300 for non-holidays in late fall and the winter.

Almost all fares with a yellow promo star are not eligable for $$ off coupons according to the agent on the phone.

Timo

The only advantage I see from this cert is that it eliminates the 8 day minimum that the current cheap seats have. This allows it to actually be a mileage run with same day return. Just listing my find for the PI059 cert sale. Best deal for myself CVG-MSP-DTW-FRA-DTW-MSP-CVG for $415.39 all in with same day return.