Virgin ticket prices

[newswatcher]

Am planning to fly to Far East next May, and would like to visit both HKG and SIN on the same trip. Am exploring all possible ways to minimise ticket costs, without extending flight duration too much. Now Virgin fly to HKG and, through their code-sharing agreement with SQ, to Singapore. On Virgin site, return to HKG with VS is £525 and return to SIN with SQ is £650. Great, or so I thought, I should be able to get a ticket out to HKG and back from SIN for about £590.

Wrong! Virgin site calculates that this ticket will actually cost me £725. BA ticket for same routing is £560 yes I know it is same airline but, don't Virgin have a code-share............. So I ring up Virgin to see if there is a mistake. "No", says Virgin reservations clerk, "£725 is correct, you would be better off flying with BA instead"!

:confused:

Emirates will do the above routing for about £450, and only 2 hours extra per leg (and with better leg-room?), I need to allow about £100 for the HKG-SIN leg. Cathay will fly me LON-HKG-SIN-HKG-LON for £675, including the return between HKG and SIN, which is missing from the other quotes!

As there are two of us going, Emirates currently have the edge on pure cost!

[Globaliser]

It looks like the reason for this is that the cheapest VS fare to/from SIN has this restriction on open jaw itineraries:-OPEN JAWS
FARES MAY BE COMBINED ON A HALF ROUND TRIP BASIS
-TO FORM SINGLE OR DOUBLE OPEN JAWS.
PROVIDED -
THE OPEN SEGMENT MUST BE
WITHIN ANY ONE COUNTRY
COMBINATIONS ARE WITH ANY ROUND TRIP INSTANT PURCHASE/
INSTANT PURCHASE NONREFUNDABLE/SUPER/SPECIAL INSTANT
PURCHASE/INSTANT PURCHASE 2ND LEVEL/REGULAR APEX/SUPER/
SPECIAL APEX/APEX NONREFUNDABLE/BUDGET APEX
NONREFUNDABLE-TYPE FARES FOR ANY CARRIER IN ANY RULE
AND TARIFF.The open jaw fare on VS therefore ends up being a combination of the cheap fare to HKG, and a relatively unrestricted although more expensive Y class fare on the SIN-LHR.

This restriction isn't present in the corresponding BA fares, hence you can get a simple combination of two cheap fares.

Don't forget that on Emirates, you'll have to change in Dubai in both directions - but you know that. Also, if your flights are on their 777s, you'd better be slim: 10-abreast instead of the normal 9-abreast. Of course, the BA and VS/SQ flights would be non-stop both ways, and the CX non-stop between LON and HKG.

Apart from the CX option, have you looked at other ways of getting from HKG to SIN? On random searching, it looks like there may be cheap one-ways on UA (about £65) or Jetstar Asia (about £32).

[apaddyinuk]

Newswatcher,
Did I understand you correctly saying that BA and Virgin are the same airline and we codeshare with eachother???? Surely your made a typo somewhere!!! :p

[Final 3 Greens]

So Paddy, what was the reg of the 75 you were on?

Those in glasshouses .....

[newswatcher]

apaddyinuk, not quite, "same airline" was intended to relate to using the same airline(BA) for both long legs, not that BA=VS.

Globaliser, thanks for regulation reference. I did ask VS if this would qualify as "open jaw" and they said "yes, but only if both legs could be flown by VS, even though they were separate countries". Their costing was on the basis that there would be two separate single tickets, which is where the extra cost comes from. I has naively expecting that, because they could sell return tickets to SIN through VS, that they would also be able to do this for the journey I was making.

Thanks also for warning on Emirates. I was not aware of the width configuration. Sounds the same as the "sub-contracted" BA 777 flights to Tampa and some Caribbean destinations that was much derided a few years ago. My only reference was Airline-Network, which suggests that Emirates have pitch of 34", whereas BA is 31", and Cathay and Singapore are 32".

Am also looking at HKG-SIN on another thread. I cannot find UA at less than £100, for the dates I am planning. Tiger Airways looks cheapest, but that is from Macau. Main problem is many schedules currently stop at end-Match.

NW

[Globaliser]

You can't always rely on a telephone sales agent to give you the whole truth - not necessarily from malice, more often just because they don't expect everyone to understand the ins and outs. I don't think the pricing is quite two separate single tickets, but rather a combination of half a cheap return to Hong Kong, and half of a more expensive return to Singapore because you don't qualify for the cheap return fares to Singapore. I can't be absolutely positive that the VS agent was looking at the same things that I've been getting from one of my usual search engines (http://beta.itasoftware.com/), but the prices look close enough to make it a good bet.

The cheap LHR-SIN-LHR fare that I can see on VS is fare basis LLSX3M, which has the restriction I mentioned - the agent's reference to own-operated flights suggests to me that this may be a restriction imposed by SQ on the fares that VS can sell.

The cheap LHR-HKG-LHR fare is fare basis XLGB with no such restriction.

So if you price LHR-HKG/SIN-LHR you end up with a combination of XLGB out and YLPX3M back, the latter fare not having the open jaw restriction. I suspect that the agent took one look at the Y booking class and thought it was a full-fare economy fare, which it isn't quite.

The EK 777 has possibly even a little more pitch than 34", but it's a definitely noticeable difference from the 31" or so on BA and VS. However, none of that quite made up for the horizontal squeeze for me, and I'm glad that only one of my four EK sectors was on a 777. The 330s are more conventionally laid out.

For published fares HKG-SIN, try www.zuji.com.hk (http://www.zuji.com.hk/web/content/hk/index.html). It's the Far East's equivalent of Orbitz or Opodo, but the software is Travelocity's so the look will be quite familiar. For each of 14, 15 and 16 May, it's returning a fare of HKD 876 = £65.58 for UA (HKD 1120 incl taxes = £83.86) - so it looks like this is a pretty stable price. I see what you mean about the flight times, although it's no worse than one of the current Jetstar Asia flights, and the other one basically removes an entire day from your holiday in travel.

There seems little point traipsing to Macau just to get a low-fare flight, as you have the option of major airlines or Jetstar Asia from HKG. You'd probably spend more to do that, even if the flight itself were free.

[newswatcher]

globaliser, once again many thanks. Your input is extremely useful.