Tuesday 23 July 2013

Dumped again in the Windy City



The attractive offer.
It’s still happening with Aer Lingus, despite the recent announcement by my airline of choice that it was inaugurating direct flights from Dublin to Toronto next year1.
Today I got another of those promotional emails offering me £40 off a return flight on its ‘USA  and Canada’ services. Having commented publicly (on Facebook) about the happy outcome of a previous Frontier Post blog about the lack of this precise service, I wanted to get in as early as possible on the fruits of my campaign2
So I checked it out and the price was agreeable… even attractive.
I set about placing a booking for next February. Price still OK, but then I checked the flight schedule.
Aer Lingus was offering to fly me over most of eastern Canada and the Great Lakes into the United States and dump me in Chicago's O’Hare airport again. It would arrange with United Airlines to then take me back across the Great Lakes to Canada where I wanted to go in the first place. 
The real deal.
That’s exactly like offering to fly me from Dublin to Athens, Greece, and then dumping me in Cairo, Egypt, at the mercy of a third party airline!
It's the same on the return leg – first west on United Airlines to Chicago, then back east to Dublin! 
The duration of the flight times offered are 12 hours and 59 minutes on the outward flight, and a staggering 20 hours on the homeward flight!
Given time for all those normal departure and arrival formalities, that would extract almost two entire days for hanging around airport terminals and sitting in a flying tin tube from a two-week vacation! 
And given my recent difficulties with US Customs and Border Protection3, I would probably have to allow even more flexitime in my schedule for dealing with the ugly face of America on border patrol.
I’m sending an email reply to Aer Lingus right now asking that they send no similar offers to me until they study the map and see that Canada is not simply somewhere else on the outskirts of the Windy City… and I’m enclosing this blog post as well!


1 http://www.independent.ie/business/irish/new-aer-lingus-routes-to-san-francisco-and-toronto-take-off-next-year-29390640.html

3 http://darachmac.blogspot.co.uk/2013/04/ugly-face-of-america-on-border-patrol.html