Booking awards on Aeroflot
 

Anyone have any experience? What's their economy and business class like on transatlantic segments?

Do a search on the "Other European" branch (and on "Russia"), there's plenty of info.

I was talking with a Delta representative, trying to use SkyMiles to book a ticket from Budapest to Bangkok. One of the alternatives offered was on Aeroflot. The connection time was not bad, but I noticed that the SVO-BKK leg was on an Ilyushin96, and decided to double connect with Korean instead.

IL96 have new Business class seats installed. These are superior to what KE offers, in addition to personal DigiPlayers offered to each Business passenger, and excellent meal service, I would pick SU over KE.

I booked one leg of my RTW specifically on ICN-SVO for that exact reason: to fly on one of the newly refurbished IL96s. :)

Flew one of these 2 weeks back from SVO to OVB. VERY NICE and very big. The largest overhead bins I've ever seen on any aircraft. Hey, it's the plane of the Russian President so it's gotta be ok!

Kudos to SU for their ever improving service. Now if we can just get SVO3 up and going...

Interesting, before SU joined ST, swards were widely available. Basically it woked a lot like Starwood, if there is a seat for sale, you can get it with points. Now upon calling NW Platinum agents, looks like absolutely zero fseats available for business award for three months in thwe row. coach seats are also extremely limited. These are for US-Russia flights. Seems that SU adopted ST restrictions, and took it to the typical Russian extreme level, no seat no matter what. Very dissapointed

Anyone know what the award classes are on SU?

From this thread http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/showt...ferrerid=28181 I understand that O is business award and X is economy award, á la AF.

I'm trying to look at availability between SVO and VVO (Vladivostok) and can't find O anytime. Using KVS, I've checked about 50 dates in Dec 06 and Jun-Jul 07.

I've checked for O inventory on similar dates for SVO-AMS and SVO-JFK, and it shows O4 for many dates.

Could it be that awards WITHIN Russia use a different booking class?

The SU award booking classes in the KVS Tool thread are still current: http://eng.aeroflotbonus.ru/howtocol...px?ob_no=247#2

Looking, for example, at 01 Dec, you can see award availability:

[KVS Availability Tool 2.5.3/Platinum - Sabre: ITN/US-AXC1]
However, SU does not always 'publish' award availability through the GDS (even for their own members!). The only way to know for sure, is to have the agent create the booking (even if the flight is showing O0/X0), and 'queue' it to SU. Within ~72 hours SU will manually review availability and give their final answer.

KVS, I can't believe you found availability... I spent 20 mins looking at various dates (like I said, I must have looked at 50 or even more... that CTRL+PGUP feature is GREAT!) and found nothing!

Good tip about requesting, I didn't know that.

FYI, SU flights from Europe to BKK in C are typically available for around 1200-1300EUR, so it might not make sense to burn points to get them.

That was actually the first date I have tried :).

I was wondering... since Vladivostok is in Russia and Russia is in Europe (as far as WorldPerks in concerned, not sure about FB), is this only a 50,000 mile award RT in C?

As far as I can tell, Moscow is Europe but Vladivostok would be North Asia ("Japan, Korea, Mongolia, and the Russian Far East").

Vlad
 

If interested to competitors, do a search on the BMI forum and you will see very original topics because for them the whole Russia is Europe. Enjoy the reading.