CPH-Flyer

I have been on two charter flight trips.

The first one was also my first flight ever, so I guess the excitement of flying and age made me skip over the more obvious downsides to flying. This was on the red 727 of the original Sterling Airways.

The second was to CPH AGP, in the days before the LCCs booking a charter trip to Malaga with "unspecified hotel, to be provided by the guide on arrival" was the code for people going to their apartments on Costa del Sol. Probably half the plane was on that setup. This was back in the day when Conair of Scandinavia was still around.

​​​​​​But I guess I can tick the box of having been on a charter flight, and not need to do it again.

JR67

My first and only was to LCA. I was in my early 20s and heading to Ayia Napa, so I didn't have very high standards at the time.

GUWonder

I am not sure that my standards have changed. I used to book Valujet to fly into/out of MDW. And this year I was still booking short-haul premium cabin space on BA and SAS. And I am now looking at Fokkers to get to Stockholm.

CPH-Flyer

My standards have changed, or maybe just my needs have changed as I started travelling more. Once I get down to travelling on a more normal schedule my patience may allow me to fly Easyjet and the likes again. Charter flights I just don't think I'll get the courage to attempt again.

FlyingMoose

At least IKEA has edible food but I otherwise share your sentiment.

Charter flights have mostly just been replaced by Norwegian. The legacy purpose was to ferry white trash from Southern European and Thai vacation destinations which has mostly been taken over by LLCs. The above average employed Swede will take TG and its mostly retired people or those completely disconnected from today's offerings that still opt for the likes of Thomas Cook.

oliver2002

It really depends if the tour operators are OK with using scheduled flights. If there is enough traffic, charter operators come into play. Scheduled flight operations don't really like block bookings by tour ops as it takes out substantial chunks out of their inventory and creates havoc with their revenue management algorithms.

RedChili

From memory, I think I had eight trips with charter carriers: 2 with Sterling (Caravelle and 727 ), 2 with MyTravel/Thomas Cook, and one each with Transwede, Balkan, Britannia and Novair.

The Caravelle flights (OSL-BLL-RMI) were my firsts flights ever, in my childhood, and my first trip outside of Scandinavia, so I was perfectly happy about those flights. I had a very comfortable and pleasant ARN-LPA flight in the first row of a MyTravel A321. But the trips with Transwede (MD83), Balkan (T154) and Britannia (752) were horrible.

My last charter trip was ARN-CFU eight years ago on a Novair A321. It was about as comfortable as a Norwegian 737 flight, but it was a last minute flight only ticket at SEK 200, including bags, round-trip. At that price, I would go again. But in my experience, a charter trip is often much more expensive than booking a bundle with a low cost ticket and a separate hotel booking, so there's just no point.

GUWonder

My SAS flights to/from the US used to have lots of large group travel on board, often groups of school/university kids or a huge collection of senior citizen types. But it seems like that has become less common over time in more recent years and maybe they had shifted to the likes of Norwegian or flying LH and other carriers involving a connection.

Last year I was seeing large groups of extractive and shipping industry workers being shuttled back and forth by SAS on some of my TATL flights, but there were still some (smaller) leisure group blocks on some of the SAS TATL flights.

My first flight was probably an intra-NY flight, but my first long-haul flights were definitely flights from NY to Europe and from Europe to Asia and took place before I was 1 year old. It would be many years later before I saw a package charter tourist flight, and it was a domestic charter flight to Vegas. it struck me as a novelty since I wasn’t expecting the security screening line to be so long and slow (and full of senior citizens) at that time of the week and day at that rather rural airport.

GUWonder

Why are “fritidshus” places in and around Malmo seeing a big increase in the closing prices and also in the difference between offer price and the initial advertising prices put out by brokers? Did the applicable laws/regulations change in such a way that these properties have become hot properties despite the general economic downturn?

They now seem to be closing at high enough prices to seem to be valued more akin to vacant lots that can be used to to build free-standing homes for year-round use.

JR67

Did any of you ever fly Avioimpex? I flew them once into Skopje on my way to Pristina in the dying days of the war. Was booked on Swiss but got stranded in ZRH due to fog in Skopje. After 6 hours they rebooked us on Avioimpex and the explanation was "They are the only ones that will land in that fog." I should have been worried, but I had hooked up with some Finnish explosives guys going down to sweep for mines and tried to match them drink for drink. Just wondering if I enjoyed the flight... ;-)

(Question popped into my head after the charter airline discussions)

JR67

Edible? Not in Malmö. It used to be quite good, but it has gone downhill. VERY downhill. Our 12 year old loves their meatballs, so we have to eat there occasionally. I hate our 12 year old. ;-)

CPH-Flyer

It won't kill you, so I guess that does make it edible. I'd probably be more like to be found on a charter flight than to be found having lunch or dinner at IKEA.

Fredrik74

A conversion to a permanent residence is likely planned by a substantial part of those that buy these.

GUWonder

But that would only work if the rules had changed as traditionally most of these places didn’t allow overnight occupancy during something like the October-April period and there was some cutting off of utilities of sort to these areas during part of the year.

GUWonder

Are you looking forward to the wall in Vellinge? I hear that a verdict came out allowing a 9+ foot wall along the beaches and that it has some homeowners and so-called nature-lovers (if different) furious.

My Swedish relatives know I won’t be caught dead at IKEA if I can help it, so they don’t ask me to go and meet up for food there. Thankfully. Unfortunately, there are others reasons why I’m sometimes asked to go there, but I am like the proverbial horse that you can take to the water but which won’t drink the water and rejects IKEA Kool-Aid.

They have tried to bribe me with IKEA kanelbulle and other such unhealthy things, so maybe they are trying to kill me off with the proverbial white poisons that make a person more likely to be susceptible to have the underlying conditions that make recovery from COVID-19 a lot harder or maybe even impossible.