Monday, September 25, 2006

Strangely, I am missing GDS access

I try to cram all of my business travel into the shortest amount of time to minimise days away from the family. Has resulted in some interesting itineraries in the past including a 4 hour layover in Istanbul airport, a 10 hour backtrack from Greece to Australia via Frankfurt and manufacturing an red eye flight from Sydney to Singapore (much harder than it sounds).

I have a new trip I am working on that I did not think would be hard but is proving frustratingly hard to figure out. Across a five day week I want to spend two days in London and two days in Tel Aviv (with a day in between to travel between the two). This should be easy - Tel Aviv is only 5.5 hours from London and almost in a straight line from Sydney. However the benefits of this geography are not reflected in airline schedules or the politics of the Middle East. Therefore I am struggling to find a way that does not involve going through London both ways - which means leaving on a Saturday not a Sunday, increases the security delays and therefore costs a lot of time. I have tried a few of the new generation websites and information destinations for tips - but have found nothing.

Have found myself missing the access to native Galileo that I had in my old job where I was able to look deep into airline schedules without the biasing and deal dependencies that exist in the online travel agent world. Wow...I just said that I missed GDS access...who'd have thought it.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Here's a wild concept,

Try a Travel Agent

Amazing when you delegate this sort of task how much more time one has to sepend with family...

Bon Voyage

Tim Hughes said...

Extended response in next post
http://tims-boot.blogspot.com/2006/09/come-on-tim-stop-complaining-and-use.html