Does anyone here have regular and or recent experience of flying intercontinentally with BA, KLM, or Lufthansa? Within Europe I no longer touch BA with a bargepole, and I seem to hear a lot of stories about Lufthansa arbitrarily cancelling flights these days, but intercontinental is often significantly better. All my intercontinental trips these days are East which means I can use good airlines. But now I am in need of a flight from Mexico DF to Europe and those three plus Aeromexico are my options
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I don't do this as often as I used to, but I would go with Lufthansa, with KLM being a pretty close second. They are definitely better on intercontinental routes, though you should be sure that it is a LH flight rather than a code share with someone else's equipment and crew. KLMs catering can be quite cheese heavy, which could be determinative for you.
I'd also prefer Munich or Schiphol to Frankfurt as a general rule, though the precise location of connecting gates makes a difference.
You might try Gramsci via DM on Twitter as he is the current champion of such things.Last edited by ursus arctos; 16-10-2018, 16:32.
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My recent experience of BA has been that it's getting worse and worse as time goes on. There was a period, probably a decade ago, where BA was clearly superior to US-based carriers. I've not flown on a US carrier for a while, but BA is trying it's hardest to level the playing field. The new economy class seating is somehow more uncomfortable than before - for example, the inability to completely raise the armrests is a baffling annoyance when you have an empty seat next to you. The service has become grumpier and less considerate, moving into the realms that I used to handle when flying on Delta or the as-then Northwest. I still use them, because they have a daily direct flight from San Diego, but I wouldn't recommend if you have any alternative. Terminal 5 at Heathrow is also becoming more irritating, which adds another reason to give them a miss.
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Well, whatever you do, don't fly a Chinese airline. It's ok if it works, but once a flight is cancelled, they have no idea what to do with the passengers. They told me in Guangzhou that if they couldn't rebook me on another flight to Japan before my Chinese transit visa ran out, that they'd have to deport me to Europe. So I helpfully suggested that they just fly me to any airport in Japan. "No, we can only fly you to the destination city on the ticket as per our rules". Would make you pine for Ryanair. How these airlines got into SkyTeam, I don't know.
I fly on Star Alliance airlines. They have a collection of good airlines (Air Canada, Austrian, United, SAS, Singapore, Swiss, Lufthansa), and they actually do work together so they are able to easily and quickly rebook you on a partner flight if anything goes wrong.
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I've spend the last week trying to figure out how to get from Toronto/Detroit/Buffalo to Ft Myers area (on March break, 2019) for under 4 grand Canadian. I have no clue what happened to airfares this year, but it's fucked. The grudging winner was Allegiant, but even it was spendy compared to our usuals (most often Delta out of Detroit).
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Have flown Lufthansa inter continental in the last two years and generally would happily do so again, the service and reliability have been good. The downside as already agreed is having to transfer through Frankfurt which we had to do both times on the way back, with long distances between gates, short transfer times and having to go through security again all adding up to a frustrating time on the way back after a long first flight.
Saying that coming back from Tokyo last year there was a delay in boarding, and when we had all boarded, an announcement to the effect that only half of the toilets on the flight would be working (those on one side), with a bit of jollity from the announcer that everyone will agree that was better than the other option which was cancelling the flight and flying everyone home the next day. Or in other words, better for Lufthansa as this way they wouldn't have to pay any delay compensation, as opposed to a lot thereof.
There was the usual surge to use the toilets an hour or so into the flight, leading to queues (the toilets were down some steps) and the flight crew starting to angrily tell people they were threatening the safety of the flight as the crew couldn't get through with the duty free trolleys to which someone pointed out we weren't the ones who decided to fly with half the toilets on a fully booked flight, and someone else (ok it was me this time) suggested that selling fags and perfume probably wasn't the most important thing right then, and they could maybe wait til the queue went down, which they did.
Cue several terse announcements in the rest of the flight that people should only go to the toilet if it was necessary, as if we'd all been doing it frivolously til then.
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Turkish Airlines is good, but those seats are narrower than most. I've found KLM very good. Emirates I have found totally overrated.
I think the best intercontinental flight I've had was also the longest, from Cape To Washington on South African Airways. Except for the stop in Dakar.
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I've flown BA to Tampa a couple of times and found them very good, but I have to stress that I wasn't in economy. When I've flown economy with them in Europe they've been ok, but there are definitely some flight crew who could use a visit to charm school. Only flown Lufthansa within Europe, not flown KLM at all - so I've not been much help there really, have I?
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BA have definitely had the steepest decline in quality since the turn of the century, mirroring what happened to the better US carriers in the 90s.
Swiss are very efficient and unfussy, but their Network is a fraction of what Swissair's once was.
We did some disclosure work for Chinese airlines. I wouldn't choose one if I had alternatives.
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Originally posted by Third rate Leszno View PostI've flown BA to Tampa a couple of times and found them very good, but I have to stress that I wasn't in economy.
For us the big problems are on the ground rather than in the air. These days Heathrow (except perhaps Terminal 5) is to be avoided at all costs. On the past two occasions our baggage and wheelchair have been dumped in the pick-up area with no security. Both times its taken us over an hour to find out where they are. This in spite of a large fluorescent orange label on the chair reading: "PLEASE DELIVER TO PLANE." As noted above, fundamentally I don't think this is BA's problem, it's more to do with outsourcing labour at the airport and communication problems between ground and airline staff. It's never happened elsewhere.
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I wouldn't fly Turkish Airlines. They have been expanding so quickly that there's no way their pilots are all up to speed. They regularly make the news with dodgy landings and runway overruns and things like that. It's also why I won't fly Chinese airlines again. They are expanding way too fast. I had some seriously weird landings with them. Food on BA mighn't be great but the pilots are good. There's piece of mind with that.
If you are booking a flight also consider looking at seatguru.com Certain plane/airline combinations are more cramped than others.
I try to avoid the Boeing 787. It was originally designed as eight seats across but airlines are filling them nine across (because Boeing allowed for the possibility). They are very cramped. Boeing 777 depends on the airline: some are nine seats across and others ten. Avoid the ten seats across. The nine seats across is nice.
Airbus is always a safe bet because Airbus have the width of the cabin better optimised. A330, especially if you can get the two seats off to the window, is always good.
So if I have to choose one airline or another, the plane flying the route is usually a decisive factor.
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