stargold

That's remarkable - you managed to get them to book flights which are 3x the distance of the obvious alternative!

IAN-UK

Remarkable indeed - even if it's their own metal to Doha, last minute space on Qatar DOH CGK will cost them something like ten times the price of buying a seat on Malaysia's KUL CGK service.

...and we 're talking about an airline that tried to deny me ground transport between DXB and AUH after they cancelled my direct CMB AUH flight

gogooo

Doubt these are as simple trsnsactions as UL paying QR with the UL credit card. These tickets are on "contra" basis. However Your ground transportation is out of pocket for UL.

IAN-UK

I'm sure it is contra, but I can't see QR adding much to balance Sri Lankan's debits.

Rescuing passenger from the cancellations must have turned Sri Lankan's accounts with Qatar, Malaysia and Etihad the deepest of reds.


UL's Abu Dhabi station cut through the taxi nonsense coming from Colombo by sending a car to transfer me home from DXB.

gogooo

Suspect QR and EY due to overbookings and missed connections from doh/auh. MH hardly helps with rebooking on other carriers. Again the auh office just used an existing vendor contract to get u from dxb. I found it hard with any airline to get out of pocket reimbursements. Suppose they only have incoming facility.

Grace B

If they're going bankrupt (or are already), certainly none of this will help their situation.

Seems rather bizarre to me.

IAN-UK

The government is going to neutralise the airline's indebtedness if/when the Etihad takeover goes ahead. Maybe that colours the way UL's board faces its current crisis.

Perisai

Next round of discounts; does seem to take off approx. 15% on the classic route:

P.S.: it doesn't show on GF but works fine on the UL homepage.

IAN-UK

This time the headline (20%) discount doesn't apply to the ticket price. It is applied to the 'fare" component. The rather hefty fees, surcharges etc remain unchanged.

The result gives a discounted ticket at AED3375 against the usual lowest price of AED3765, or �725 against �808. Not much better than half the headline discount

our_kid

Even so �725 for 560TP is �cheap as chips� and I have always found the UL crews to be great!

Using this offer to head out to Indonesia in May.

Perisai

% of discount is better at other departure points; ex DXB it is about the 15% I've mentioned and it let's one skip the 320 for the redeye flight 🙂

IAN-UK

Sure, even if you need to add in the costs of getting to Abu Dhabi, hotels and a visa, you can probably do the trip for less than �1,200.

The best trip requiring a pricey dislocation was Malaysia's KL to Ahmedabad, again a long way in a narrow-body, but offering even cheaper chips at 280TPs for �320 round-trip.
(booked 5 day's ago, but i just checked, and it seems to have died)

Gazzerg

Jamie, as a heads up I messaged the Sri Lankan location manager that helped sort you out last year. He said there might be a longer walking distance compared to what you could do in the old terminal, but assuming you don't have any checked luggage and if. you can check in online you should be fine. Might give it a go next month....

subject2load

@ awarty : many thanks for the comprehensive report (#1362) following your recent challenging travels.

Have to say, I don�t always have the patience for such lengthy posts, but this was so well-written (and full of interest) that I voraciously consumed every word from start to finish.

Have no idea what you do for a living (and whether or not it involves much in the way of writing) ��.. but whatever it is, I�d happily bet that you�re damn good and efficient at it. And whilst I myself have managed (somehow ) to negotiate my way to / through more than one hundred countries using around 85 different airlines, I would sure take a lot of comfort from having you �on hand� whenever forced to tackle unforeseen messy flight and paperwork complications en route !

A word of appreciation too wrt useful contributions from IAN-UK, thanks.

flylikelinz

yep did it last night! It�s a breeze other than the walk its super simple. there is no BP check just a quick security screen and then down into the main atrium. At the Gate they printed my boarding passes after showing them a print out of my pdf version one. I expect you can go there even with just a confirmation pass or mobile one too.
I messaged the station manager as I landed asking if I would be ok and he said no problem.