Yesterday, we explored the routes that make the most sense for Lisa and they were:
Outbound
YUL-IST-MXP on Turkish Airlines
YUL-ZRH-MXP on Swiss Airlines
Inbound
GVA-IST-YUL on Turkish Airlines
GVA-ZRH-YUL on Swiss Airlines
We also know that Lisa is looking to travel April 13th with a return on April 23rd and she would like to travel in Business Class. Today we begin the search for that availability.
Flexibility
As I have preached in previous posts, flexibility is key when it comes to finding award flights and this is no exception. In Lisa’s request, she had very specific dates of travel (April 13-23) and while we can certainly find her availability, it might not be the most ideal situation for a few reasons:
- Availability might be through a carrier such as Air Canada that charges fuel surcharge
- Airlines may only fly the route you require on certain days of the week
- Connection times on certain days of the week are not ideal to catch your onward flight
As an example, Lisa wants to leave on a Thursday (April 13) so let’s use Flight Connections to find out the days of the week Turkish Airlines flies from YUL to IST as well as Swiss Airline’s route from YUL-ZRH.
As you can see, we have a bust with the YUL-IST route because Lisa wants to fly out on a Thursday and Turkish Airlines only flies the route on Sundays, Tuesdays and Fridays.
Let’s look at Swiss Airlines’ route from YUL-ZRH to see if we have better luck.
Unfortunately, we face the same bust. No flights on the route on Thursdays.
Now I haven’t spoken to Lisa so I am unsure why she has chosen the dates she has but for this example, let’s imagine she has flexibility of a day on either side of her dates (+/- 1 day).
Lisa, if you are reading this, feel free to contact me at jayce@pointsnerd.ca if the itinerary we come up with doesn’t meet you needs.
Using Award.Flights to Find Availability
As I wrote about in a previous article, Award.Flights is my preferred search method because it is free and effective. There are certainly paid tools like AwardNexus, Expert Flyer and KVS that will allow for award searches but Award.Flights will do much of the same but you can use it for free.
I won’t go into the mechanics of using Award.Flights. For that, please refer to my previous post about it.
YUL-IST
As I noted in the section above, we are going to assume Lisa has the flexibility with a +/- 1 Day range. With that concession, let’s look at what the YUL-IST has available.
We got lucky right out of the gate. We can see that with our search of YUL-IST on 4/12/17 + 2 days (that’s how you set up Award.Flights to do +/- 1 day), there is availability in both Business (J) and Economy (Y).
What we also see here is that Award.Flight did us a favour because while it was searching from YUL-IST, if found that you could go from YUL-IST-ZRH. We of course aren’t interested in that second leg of IST-ZRH but we now know that there is availability from YUL-ZRH on April 12th in Business Class.
Let’s verify this through a specific search of YUL-ZRH.
YUL-ZRH
WOW!
So apparently our initial check with Flight Connections yielded some bad information. Swiss Airlines actually does fly on Thursdays from YUL-ZRH, however, one thing to keep in mind is that on Thursdays, the aircraft used is the A330-300 which has a slightly older configuration than the 777-300 which flies on Wednesdays and Fridays.
From One Mile at a Time’s post, the difference seems to be summed up as this:
Swiss’ new business class looks somewhat similar to the Vantage-style staggered seats they have on their Airbus fleet. However, it seems to be quite a bit more private and spacious. If you look at the area around the feet, it looks like there’s not just a small cutout anymore, so you’ll have lots more room when in the bed position. That’s great news.
Regardless of the differences, this now opens up a lot more flexibility for us to get Lisa to Milan.
What I typically do is to copy the results from Award.Flights into a spreadsheet to keep track of what I had found so that I can see if the onward connection will work with the flight we initially found.
Now that we have the large oversea route found, we can concentrate on the Istanbul (IST) to Milan (MXP) and Zurich (ZRH) to Milan (MXP) commuter flights. One thing to keep in mind is that many international flights land on a different date than they day they departed so keep that in mind when searching for the connection. In this example, we can see that both the Turkish and Swiss flights arrive the day after so we need to account for that in our search.
As we can see, there are a few options to get from IST-MXP on the April 15th. This reiterates why searching the overwater flight should be the focus. As a general rule of thumb, the closer city pairs are the more often there are flights servicing those cities.
Let’s look for the ZRH-MXP portion now but again, keep in mind you arrive the day after you depart.
As expected, there are lots of connections available from ZRH-MXP.
From here, I add these flights to the spreadsheet.
Now that we have this information, we go about matching the flights up so that we can make the connection.
For example, for the YUL-IST-MXP leg, we arrive at 15:45 (3:45pm) on the 15th so we can connect to TK1875 with a 1:10 connection or TK1877 with a 6:00 connection. Personally, I would take the 6 hours and enjoy the Turkish Airlines CIP Lounge because it’s amazing but that’s really up to Lisa. 1:10 is quite a tight connection at a large airport so I would be a bit wary about that but if you did miss the connection due to a delay, you at least know there is an alternate flight that will still get you to your destination.
Based on my own personal preferences, here are the options that I would present to Lisa:
YUL-IST on TK36
Depart 4/14/17 at 11:05 PM
Arrive 4/15/17 at 3:45 PM
IST-MXP on TK1877
Depart 4/15/17 at 9:45 PM
Arrive 4/15/17 at 11:45 PM
OR
YUL-ZRH on LX87
Depart 4/12/17 at 5:10 PM
Arrive 4/13/17 at 6:20 AM
ZRH-MXP on LX1616
Depart 4/13/17 at 9:40 AM
Arrive 4/13/17 at 10:35 AM
OR
YUL-ZRH on LX87
Depart 4/13/17 at 5:10 PM
Arrive 4/14/17 at 6:20 AM
ZRH-MXP on LX1616
Depart 4/14/17 at 9:40 AM
Arrive 4/14/17 at 10:35 AM
OR
YUL-ZRH on LX87
Depart 4/14/17 at 5:10 PM
Arrive 4/15/17 at 6:20 AM
ZRH-MXP on LX1616
Depart 4/15/17 at 9:40 AM
Arrive 4/15/17 at 10:35 AM
Each one of these flights has availability in Business Class. Personally, I would choose the YUL-ZRH-MXP route because Istanbul is quite a ways out of the way and if Milan is where you want to be, I would be tempted to take the shortest route, even though the Istanbul Airport is very cool.
The Route Home
The way we find the way home is largely repetitive so I won’t document everything in minutia but rather will show you the routes that I found available.
To refresh our memories, the routes that we determined earlier that we would search go get home were:
GVA-IST-YUL on Turkish Airlines
GVA-ZRH-YUL on Swiss Airlines
After searching the IST-YUL route from 4/22/17 + 2 days (gives us a search for +/- 1 day of 4/23/17), we actually find that there is no availability. This is certainly a bummer but we know up front that we should move onto our backup plan which is GVA-ZRH-YUL.
I will remind you once again to search the longest route first because that will be the most difficult route to find.
Let’s look for ZRH-YUL from 4/22/17 + 2 days.
We’re in luck! We have award flights in Business Class available for all three days. Now that we have the hard part out of the way, let’s look for the GVA-ZRH route. I’m going to assume that there will be tons of availability.
As suspected, there are tons of award flights from GVA-ZRH … so much so that the results overflow the screenshot I can show you.
Here’s a better view of the availability. You may notice that I have placed the GVA-ZRH at the top of my spreadsheet. That’s because that’s the first flight we need to take.
Based on the information that we have gathered, here are the route options I would give to Lisa:
GVA-ZRH on LX2807
Depart 4/22/17 at 10:00 AM
Arrive 4/22/17 at 10:55 AM
ZRH-YUL on LX86
Depart 4/22/17 at 12:50 AMP
Arrive 4/22/17 at 2:55 PM
OR
GVA-ZRH on LX2807
Depart 4/23/17 at 10:00 AM
Arrive 4/23/17 at 10:55 AM
ZRH-YUL on LX86
Depart 4/23/17 at 12:50 AMP
Arrive 4/23/17 at 2:55 PM
OR
GVA-ZRH on LX2807
Depart 4/24/17 at 10:00 AM
Arrive 4/24/17 at 10:55 AM
ZRH-YUL on LX86
Depart 4/24/17 at 12:50 AMP
Arrive 4/24/17 at 2:55 PM
The only thing to keep in mind is that the GVA-ZRH are currently only available in Economy Class (Y) but because of the short flight, I wouldn’t care very much about that.
Final Route
Based on our findings, the best route for Lisa would be:
Outbound
YUL-ZRH on LX87
Depart 4/13/17 at 5:10 PM
Arrive 4/14/17 at 6:20 AM
ZRH-MXP on LX1616
Depart 4/14/17 at 9:40 AM
Arrive 4/14/17 at 10:35 AM
Inbound
GVA-ZRH on LX2807 (Economy)
Depart 4/23/17 at 10:00 AM
Arrive 4/23/17 at 10:55 AM
ZRH-YUL on LX86
Depart 4/23/17 at 12:50 AMP
Arrive 4/23/17 at 2:55 PM
Tomorrow’s Lesson
Tomorrow we will recap some of the key areas of focus as well as a review of the tools that were utilized in this search.