You Can't Get There from There

We, in the U.S., are spoiled. My earlier rant about airline delays notwithstanding, one of the more convenient by-products of all that airline scheduling is that you can fly nearly anywhere in this country on any day of the week. Pick just about any city with an airport and there is probably at least one flight serving it per day. More often than not, there are multiple flights available.

Throughout most of the rest of the world, however, it’s a vastly different story. In fact, nearly the opposite is true. Even between major cities, there is not always daily airline service available. Also, even though there may be more than one carrier to choose from, they generally operate on a single hub and spoke system. So unless your destination is the main airport or one of the spokes for the airline you’re using, you are probably going to go through some other airline’s hub on the way there… even if it means backtracking several hundred miles.

Initially, we had planned to go from Egypt directly to South Africa. Not only were we limited by the lack of available flights, we also ultimately found out that that particular leg would not be included in the alliance fare because it was operated by a non-member airline, even though that flight is scheduled by an alliance member airline and is listed as that alliance member’s flight. Go figure. So we will wind up backtracking to Athens and connecting in Frankfurt to get to South Africa. Although they are not on our itinerary as destinations, we will be passing through Frankfurt once and Singapore twice. Even though Bangkok is on the itinerary, we will be passing through there a second time on the way to somewhere else.

The overall lack of ‘US-like’ flight options along with the scheduling limitations as a result of utilizing an alliance for air travel (which essentially reduces the number of airlines you can choose from) leaves us in a situation where the money saved on airfare is expended on convenience. In our case, we decided that the cost savings would be worth it. If we wanted to, we could book the Egypt to Johannesburg leg separately. However, the cost for that leg alone would be close to a fifth of what the total fare is for all the rest of the air segments covered by the alliance. Convenience ain’t cheap.