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June 30, 2007Aer Lingus: Low-lightsHotel web site and Charging for seat selection. Be careful if you use the Aer Lingus hotel web site. A while back, I held off on booking my usual hotel because I had noticed some pretty decent prices for 4 star hotels in Brussels on the Aer Lingus site and I "booked" one and then learned a full 24 hours later that it didn't actually book it but made a suggestion for another hotel in a total different part of the city and at 40 euros more expensive to boot. They do, however, give you the opportunity to reject their counteroffer though at no charge, which I did without delay. I rang them up to complain and they pointed out to me that you have to select ones that have 'Available' written next to them, which I hadn't noticed on the site and/or during the booking process. Luckily, my usual hotel was still available at the same price as 24 hours previous. I would have been really steamed otherwise. I also noticed that Aer Lingus are now charging to select your seat. They charge 3 euros to reserve a seat and you have to go through the whole credit card payment process for this piddly amount. It occurred to me while doing it that this is a real dis-incentive to reserving seats because now more people won't do it because a. since they are being charged and b. you probably won't be guaranteed to have an empty seat next to you any more on non full flights. The whole purpose for picking your seat ahead of time is to choose seats that still have the seat next to you vacant (for example middle seats) so there is some chance the seat next to you will be vacant on non full flights but now if far less people are selecting their seat due to being charged and hassle of paying for it, Aer Lingus themselves will just randomly seat passengers into these seats and you will have people sitting there regardless of your pre-selection ;-(.Posted by jclarke at 6:15 PM | TrackBack Paris: General InformationGeneral InformationI really enjoy Paris as a destination. I generally try to stay around the Luxembourg/Port Royal areas (serviced by RER B from Paris CDG airport) due to the proximity to the St. Michel area and a lot of restaurants and night spots. Posted by jclarke at 9:16 AM | TrackBack Paris: Low-lightsProblems with trains/ticketsWhen I first arrived to the Paris CDG RER B station on my way into the city centre hotel, since I knew that I needed to commute back and forth to the airport over the next 3 days, I decided to purchase a 3 day tourist ticket for 38 euros, which is supposed to work on all RER, Metro and buses in the five zones of Paris. For some reason, the ticket only worked for 24 hours at a time and I kept having to bring it to the ticket desk to get it renewed for another 24 hour period every time it expired. Luckily, I held onto the little ticket holder they had given me because that had the ticket number imprinted on it and from there, they were able to prove it was a 3 day ticket. The price or number of days the ticket was for was NOT printed on the ticket itself, which was a bit strange and if I didn't have the ticket holder, I probably would not have been able to get the ticket re0issued for the second 24 hours. Another issue that I had with trains on this trip, I was travelling onwards to Brussels from Paris so during one of the lunch breaks, I went to the Grand Lignes TGV station at CDG and purchased a ticket from Paris CDG train station to Brussels Midi. I noticed when booking this, that there seems to be fewer trains going now directly from Paris CDG to Brussels Midi as there used to be. I seem to recall a train every two hours but now there only seems to be 3 or 4 per day. When I bought the ticket out in CDG train station, I noticed that I had purchased the ticket from SCNF, the French railway system. When it came time to leave, I realised that it would probably be easier if I travelled directly from Paris Nord instead of going out to the airport again since I was leaving directly from my hotel. I decided to get off at Paris Nord and try to change my ticket there. As I had a first class ticket, I figured it would be no problem. To my surprise, it was a major problem. I was told at Paris Nord that I would have to buy a whole new ticket from Thalys to get the earlier train to Brussels. I decided against doing that obviously and had to get back on the RER B train and go out to the airport train station and I caught my originaly scheduled train from there. The only thing I can conclude is that SCNF and Thalys do not seem to be linked now, whereas I used to think that they were somehow. So one needs to be careful about this inconsistency when booking trains around Paris. Posted by jclarke at 9:02 AM | TrackBack Paris: High-lightsReasonable place to stay I stayed at a place called Hotel Comfort Cardinal Rive Gauche in the centre of Paris recently. Although I believe that I booked the hotel on http://www.ratestogo.com, it has it's own web site at http://www.hotelcardinal.com. The hotel is a short walk (approx. 10 minutes) from the Port Royal RER B station, which is station following Luxembourg on the main RER B line from Paris CDG airport to the city. The hotel is also walking distance from the Luxembourg area, St. Michel vicinity and a lot of restaurants and night spots. One of the reasons that I selected this one was that the hotel had advertised air conditioning in every room, which was abslutely necessary the time I was there as it was very hot there. I was attending a conference that was being held at an airport hotel so it required a commute into and back from the airport every day, which wasn't a major problem except it used to take approximately 1 hour each way, depending on whether i stuck it lucky getting the express train. I still have not been able to figure out the coding scheme for the trains to determine which train is an express although I am sure there is some way to do it.Posted by jclarke at 8:53 AM | TrackBack June 29, 2007Air FranceLow-lightsWhen we arrived in Paris off the Dublin – Paris leg of our flight, we looked up to the tv screen and immediately discovered that our Paris – JHB flight for that evening was cancelled. We went over to the Air France transfer desk and they told us that the flight had been cancelled due to technical difficulties. We were originally due to fly out on the Wednesday evening arriving on Thursday morning to JHB and connecting to a 9am flight to Maputo, which would arrive around 10.30-11.00am. Once hearing all this, I handed over my e-ticket for the South African Airways flight, which was purchased completely separately from the Air France tickets and told them to make good on this ticket as we were travelling onwards from JHB. Nowadays, this is sometimes tricky when the carriers and tickets are not “in line” and purchased on the one ticket. However, they told me it would present no problem and started looking at the options for getting onwards to Maputo. Originally, they were saying we would overnight in Paris and then fly out the next morning but then they could not find a connecting flight to Maputo the next day at all if we did this. I explained to them that I needed to be in Maputo on Friday at 9am at the latest as I was speaking in a session that started at 9am and if I was going to miss this, there was no sense in going on the trip at all. I think that I might evenhave mentioned the word “refund” at this stage. With this, the ticket agent excused herself and went into a back room and spoke to a manager and then came back and told us that there were actually two seats left on the 11pm Air France flight that same night to JHB and we could have these seats. It turns out they were quite literally the last seats as they were in the very last row of the a/c (see my note about this under high-lights section as they were excellent seats). Once she rebooked us on this flight and printed our boarding cards, she seemed to turn her attention to the SAA flight, and eventually printed out something with the flight time of the SAA flight we were to go on, which was now at around 12 noon, instead of the original 9am flight we had been originally booked on. At this stage, we were fairly pleased with the outcome and were given the impression that the paper they gave me was all that was needed to get on this SAA flight. When we arrived the next morning in JHB, we walked quickly to the immigration/passport control desk to get into the baggage area as we were told by Air France personnel in Dublin that it would be safer to book the bag through to JHB only and collect the bags there and transfer them ourselves to the SAA flight. At the window with the immigration agent, we were surprised to learn that we needed a visa to enter into the baggage area. After explaining that we were getting an onward flight to Maputo, the agent pointed out that we needed to go back from whence we came and instead go to the transfer desk of SAA and ask them to speak to the Air France staff and they would collect and transfer our luggage directly to the SAA flight. So we didn’t actually officially enter Johannesberg on this trip. Oh well. After asking about our luggage and speaking to the Air France staff, they promised to collect our bags and transfer them (they did actually, which made us very happy later in Maputo to see our bags arrive). Back at the SAA desk, I presented the printout that the Air France lady had given me the night before and the SAA agent looked at it with a strange expression on her face and she then asked for my e-ticket instead. Being a little perplexed and a lot tired, I explained that this was all that I had from the Air France people during the rebooking process following the cancelled flight the previous night. She looked in the computer and told me that as far as they were concerned, our tickets were now cancelled as we had not turned up to the flight earlier that morning. Starting to get a little nervous and twitchy, I asked whether they had heard anything from Air France regarding us or anyone else on the cancelled Air France flight from the night before and they said, “Nope” or words to that affect. After explaining again what had happened in Paris the night before without sounding too concerned or worried, they very kindly said that they now understood the whole situation and they had a good working relationship with Air France and were sure that they would make good with the new tickets purchase for us. They re-issued new tickets, although I had to provide my credit card to them for some strange reason (their explanation was a little vague as to why they needed it). I will have to keep an eye on my credit card statements to see if there are any new charges to SAA! So I don’t know what happened with Air France, whether they had just simply forgotten to rebook our SAA tickets or whether it was done purposely. I would like to give them the benefit of the doubt and say it was the former.
On the flight back, the only thing that was a little aggravating was there was a very short time between the flight arriving in Paris CDG and the flight back to Dublin. In addition, we arrived in 2C but the Dublinflight was in 2F, which required a quite long and infrequent coach ride. Most of the other passengers were also connecting to very tight flights and there was considerable stress in the small area where we were waiting for the coach to bring us to 2F. It was an extremely cold and breezy place that we had to wait and it was very frustrating because at least 10 buses for other terminals, mainly T1 arrived before the terminal 2 bus finally arrived. The staff that were present were not explaining to anyone why this was happening or when the next bus would arrive and there were some very anxious people waiting, a large number of them quite elderly. So we had to squish into the bus like sardines and we just made our connecting flight with minutes to spare. I asked the lady when boarding whether they would have held the flight for us and was told in no uncertain terms “NO!”. She said we would have been put on the next flight out, which was at least 6 hours later. Which would have been an extremely miserable to have to wait for that.
Posted by jclarke at 12:42 AM | TrackBack Air FranceHigh-lightsAll of the flights once they got going from Dublin to Johannesberg via Paris were very good, we travelled on a 777 and on the trip there, we had the very last seats on the plane, row 48. Although the 777 is a 3 x 4 x 3 configuration, the last rows on the window sides have only 2 seats with 3 seat tables, which definitely made it seem like it was a bigger seating area. It also wasn’t too close to the toilets, which had concerned me as there is a corridor back there that you go through before reaching the toilets. So thankfully, we weren’t subjected to hearing flushing all night long. IFE was very good with seat back TVs. Posted by jclarke at 12:39 AM | TrackBack Air FranceGeneral InformationI was recently travelling to Maputo, Mozambique for the IST Africa 2007 conference and after searching high and low for bargains, I was pointed in the right direction by the Conference organisers to Air France, who were offering reasonable web fares from Dublin to Johannesberg via Paris and then South African Airways from Jo’Berg to Maputo. The cost for the DUB – JHB leg was 528 euros return and JHB – MAP was approx. 200 euros. |
