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| 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.
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| 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
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