Viking Air Plus

[CCWineLover]

1 hour ago, dwlmg said:

Our travel agent was able to book our Viking Air Plus flights for a return flight on July 22, 2021 today, September 23, 2021.

Great news!  From where to where are you flying?  coach?  Premium Economy?  Business?

We are going in July, Midnight Sun.

[dwlmg]

2 hours ago, CCWineLover said:

Great news!  From where to where are you flying?  coach?  Premium Economy?  Business?

We are going in July, Midnight Sun.

We are going economy on Delta from Baltimore to Fairbanks. Pristine Alaska pre trip, Inside Passage southbound, and Vancouver back to Baltimore. We wanted to go via Alaska Air but apparently Viking no longer contracts with Alaska Air. 

[What was that?]

Air reservations for our 24 Jan 2022 Northern Lights cruise have been in limbo since mid-August when AA did major surgery on their schedule. I could not see any itinerary details on MVJ or the AA website, but - strangely enough - the AA app on my phone showed everything, including several problems, not the least of which was requiring a time machine to make our LHR connections. After waiting over a month for Viking to sort it all out, I called VAP and was able to obtain "better" (=workable) flights, but in the process I learned that AA and Viking at this time are not on the same page regarding booking flights. All but one or two of the transatlantic flights I had on my "acceptable" list were "not available" according to the VAP agent I spoke with. I am hopeful that I will be able to change these flights in the future - before Viking tickets them - as more AA flights work their way thru the contracting maze to Viking.

To prepare for my VAP call I made a table of relevant flights via AA-served airports, and in the end it paid off, although both the VAP agent and I had to run thru a fair number of routings that turned out to be unavailable. Fortunately, I have a fair amount of free time to do that. Here is a small example of how I do that:

 

LHR-RNO, 5 February 2022
Origin	Flights	Stop	Flights	Time	Dest'n
LHR	AA51, 1445-1910, 77W	DFW	AA1273, 2220-2354, 738	17:09	RNO
	AA137, 1130-1500, 77W	LAX	AA3280, 1749-1920, CR7	17:05
	AA155, 1310-1510, 72W	SEA	AA7581, 1740-1920, 170	14:10

 

For the outbound I just added another "Stop" and "Flights" column. This table originally listed every flight between the two cities, and was reduced to those routings that we would accept. To me, the important data is the flight number and operating times. Other useful information that I have added is the aircraft type (I like to know this) and total time. For this part of our travel, the routing via DFW was the only one available at the time.