aus Flyertalk von
Tommy777
Today is the day, folks. We are FINALLY done getting the charter ready for ticketing. We are having some issues so you might not be able to ticket till tomorrow.
Let me just explain what has taken so long: We have the last 5 months communicated with Lufthansa on chartering first a wide body and when that wasn't possible, two narrow bodies.
We got an acceptable offer and made a commitment to LH on the narrow bodies.
Late July LH in Germany all of a sudden came back with a sorry Charlie, we can't guarantee a narrow body now, but offered us to wait till we got closer to see if they could guarantee capacity for us.
That was unacceptable for Oliver an I and for obvious reasons.
We had pretty much worked with the charter for 5 months and had to start from scratch.
Within a week or so, Lufthansa USA actually was able to come up with some decent offers, as well as ourselves looking in to other options.
At the end of the day, we decided to partner up with former Lufthansa subsidiary, Condor. I am happy to say that we just before this weekend was able to secure a beautiful bird from them for our party across Europe. Thank you, Sabine and Silvia for helping us get this together
Here she is:
http://www.nue-wings.de/pictures/pho...E08MAY06_g.jpg
Yes it's a charter aircraft, but the seat pitch on their 757-300 is actually 31, so the ride should be acceptable. The set up is 265 seats on this plane, but we will fly it in a 229 seat config. The first section and the last section will be Business Class and will have the middle seat blocked out, the middle section will be Economy Class
http://www12.condor.com/tcf-eu/flott...DFE.as12worker
And if we sell out, they have back up aircrafts available for us.
And now for the second challenge which was even more difficult than getting an aircraft. To have someone collect the money. Initially and normally, an airline that does ad-hoc charter will upload a flight number in to Amadeus with a fare and restrict it to sell only through a certain portal.
But that's not the way Condor works. They give us a big, fat bill for the aircraft and we have to organize the payment ourselves. We have tried to get LH or the other partners sponsoring the DO to step up and do this, but none were willing because it would mean that they have to upload their own flight number in to Amadeus and understandably, to market the flight as a LH or other number, will not work.
So our only option is to just collect the money ourselves and we have set up a Paypal account.
Unfortunately, there's of course a fee for us to collect the money and it has to come from the participants. So the charter price will go up to 465 Euro for Coach and 760 Euros for Business.
So ticketing will happen like this:
You will receive an e-mail very soon, we have some website check out issues and they might not be available until tomorrow.
When you receive the e-mail, follow the instructions and go to
www.airbusdo.com
After you have paid, you will immediately receive a receipt, but you will also receive an a-mail within a week with an electronic ticket and your seat assignments.
Thank you for your patience, I am SO glad we are now finally done with this part and can start focusing on all the fun we are putting together for everyone!!
