I've only flown one itinerary on AS but it was a very nice experience; LAS-SEA-ANC-SEA-DCA on a short notice award F ticket in June of 2002.

 

Do you earn skymiles if you connect from Alaska to Island Air in Hawaii, since you'd be flying AS-IS?

 

On an AS-IS itinerary, I would suggest caveat emptor.

 

Only Cholula can make that claim.

If there is no topic, then only things that are on topic can be off topic.

 

Only if you fly from a general airport in the Washington, D.C. area...

...then it would be AS-IS AS WAS.

Now all we need is for Traveller and Cholula, with commentary from indufan, to revive the WAS debate.What about the Dovster?...but if the on-topic topic was indeed off-topic, then is the on-topic topic on-topic, or if the on-topic topic is off-topic, then is the off-topic on-topic topic on-topic?

 

I'll help start:

When I'm looking to visit family, I always enter "WAS" into ITA to price out itineraries.

 

BWI - It's Baltimore. Baltimore does not equal Washington

IAD - The MDW of WAS - It's hubbed by an airline but never flown a lot into.

DCA - The real WAS airport. You got every major airline flying into it. It's all split up really, AA, DL, US have good amounts there.

Now, NYC and CHI are totally different...

 

BWI isn't hard to get into downtown Washington via MARC - plenty of trains (and it's cheap) to get into Union Square. Sure, BWI is a bit closer to Baltimore, but it's not unreasonable to fly into BWI. Plus, it's not that much further than IAD.

IAD gets a good bit of business - international and outside the 1250 mile perimeter means IAD. DCA is great if you're staying within said perimeter, don't mind connecting, etc., but IAD is used farely regularly. Many people will drive out to IAD and take a nonstop to the west coast or Europe rather than take a connecting flight to get to their destination.


By the way, Ticketmaster is evil. I got a $33 ticket to Springsteen today for Show 4 at Giants Stadium today - well, it was $33 before the following:

Total Convenience Charge(s) US $7.40 x 1
Total Building Facility Charge(s) US $3.00 x 1
Order Processing Charge US $4.05
TicketFast® US $2.50
TOTAL CHARGES US $49.95

Gotta love those 50% or so markup from TicketSlave.

 

Come on, some of you ever so slightly older folks here KNOW you used to get down and boogie to EW&F, ad made out in the back of dad's Chevy to Chicago (who is on tour with EW&F - I'm working that show next Tues.).

Cheap date? It made the ladies easy pickens once upon a time. I can still get down with it.

 

You missed it. Live Nation (in league with Ticketmaster) had a "no fees" day last week.

 

Of course, it wasn't on the day that Springsteen (round 2 at Giants Stadium) went on sale. Thanks TicketMaster...

 

Each of the three commercial airports within 35 miles of Washington, DC has positive and negative aspects. I personally prefer DCA but tend to use it mostly for my Christmas flights to visit family - abusive rental car rates balance out the airport's cost premium and I only rent a car for one day. I might use IAD for 1 of 10 itineraries.

 

I've had jobs in Northern Virginia for more years than many of you have had SkyMiles numbers and have grown tired of the shlep to BWI to save a few dollars. It really is impossible to get there after work if you come up from VA at Cabin John and need to negotiate the 270 split so even the best fare differential will get eaten up by a rental car and the extra night at a hotel.

OTOH, for me IAD is passable as an alternative to DCA. From my office it is only about 5 minutes further away so I can search ITA for DCA + 25 miles without having BWI results clog up the search. The big drawback to IAD is that once you get to the front door of the place, you still have a considerable trip to get out to gate B974, or whatever it is all the way out there on the end where DL sits.

 

Screw TicketFast fees. Have them mail them to you for free or use will call if it is too close to the show.

I noticed that in a few cases TicketMaster also waived their fees too. Some of them were only for lawn seats as well. My Aerosmith tickets were from Live Nation (part of the Citicard deal), I love their little interactive seat map deal and let you pick exactly the seats that you want. I am hoping it catches onto TicketMaster sooner than later.

I have noticed some really incredible deals happening on some concerts a week or two before the show. Mostly they are 2 or 4 ticket packages for some pretty low fee. Are they having that much trouble selling these seats? I suppose the people who paid more for them are just SOL.

 

The one thing I like about TicketFast is that for people who can easily lose stuff (like me) can at least keep them stored online in the TM account (or on e-mail) and print them out whenever.

Though paying $2.50 for a .pdf versus TM paying 42 cents (or whatever postage is now) is something very un-TM like - you'd think TM would charge you since they're using their ink on their ticket stock and paying their 42 cents to send that ticket out to you.

As for will call, I could do that, but these shows are at Giants Stadium, and there are going to be 75,000 people at each show (glad I'm not in the GA section - GA on a hockey arena floor is interesting enough; on an NFL stadium could be very crazy). Given that I've set up my schedule to work in Brooklyn (actually out in the neighborhood that is the namesake of a certain moderator) for the Friday and the following Thursday shows, it's going to be a bit of a hike to make it to Penn Station, then connect to a NJ Transit rush-hour train to Secaucus, then connect to a shuttle train to Meadowlands/Xanadu.