Monday, October 4, 2010

Airplane Ticket Madness

I'm looking for tickets from LAX to PEK during Thanksgiving week and prices are confusing. Since I no longer have elite status with Cathay Pacific (CX) and I'm not going to Chengdu, I'm open to flying on other airlines. I searched for LAX-PEK directly and the cheapest tickets I found were on Air Canada through Vayama (consolidator) for ~$800 connecting through Vancouver. The only direct flight is through Air China and tickets are $1,113 on Expedia. If I stick with CX, ticket are $1,243 connecting in HKG. Since I have Asia Miles on CX, I check LAX-HKG and it was ~$1,200; I would then have to use 20,000 miles for HKG-PEK round trip... not worth it.

The weird thing is that Air China is charging $950 to go from LAX-HKG through Beijing. The LAX-PEK segment is on the same flight as the $1,113 tickets above. WTF? That doesn't make any sense. Why would it cost less? Can I buy the LAX-HKG ticket and skip the Hong Kong flight?

I need to see if I can take three days off in November but it looks like I will try to get the cheap Air Canada tickets. The Transpacific portion is on a smaller Boeing 767 instead of 747/777, and the LAX-YVR flight is on an Embraer E90 which only has 4 rows of seats. The total flying time is only ~14.5 hours which is much less than the CX flight. They're part of Star Alliance... maybe I'll starting collecting miles there instead of oneworld now.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

awww c'mon. chengdu can't be that bad. just the food poisoning, bug bites, crappy service, etc.

just have incredibly low expectations.

i was talking to your other blog reader (the one in hawaii who has a girl's name) and he was complaining about the lack of postings in the past few days.

you can put word verification back on if you want. don't know if that stopped alot of bots trying to post messages to your blog.