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FLIGHTS FROM MUNICH TO LONDON

Page Ref: http://berklix.com/~jhs/flights/

Purpose: Help find & book cheap return flights from Munich to London & back

Title used to be "to Gatwick" but they stopped that route :-(

by Julian Stacey

I AM NOT A TRAVEL AGENT
PLEASE DO NOT ASK ME FOR ADVICE ON FLIGHTS !

I Am A Computer Systems Engineer And Unix Consultant
Airlines are welcome to contact me to Pay Me to fix their sites.
Other than that please only mail me, short factual corrections, Thanks.

Most Airlines Have SCREWED WEB SITES, Making Booking An Awful Pain.

Table Order: Will later be best pricing & & least web defects at top, but currently Table is UNDER CONSTRUCTION, work suspended till human time found to complete it )
AIRLINE / CATEGORY BROKE SHOK FLSH JAVA COOK MUC LGW [IN]-DIRECT DATES PRICE COMMENT
Expedia.Co.Uk (BAA) ? ? ? ? ? - - - ? 600 pound next day, 123 pounds (96 +27 taxes), Cheapest 109 pound, 10 days ahead. Search Engine Embedded with B.A.A Only accepts credit cards with UK addresses
Expedia.De (BAA) ? ? ? ? ? - - - ? Same as .com Search Engine
United No No No ? ? Yes Yes ? ? 200 Euro itn.net
British Airways Yes (MTU ?) ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? "select your country" breaks
Lufthansa Yes (MTU ?) ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? no obvious button to Buy tickets after finding flights
Cirrus NO NO NO NO NO No, City ? ? ? 330 Euro @ 2006.03 inc a weekend +49 180 444 4888 Fairchild Dornier 328, 32 Seat. "Full size toilet" Turbo Prop & Jet options, (which do Cirrus use ?) Type first flew in 1991
TO CHECK BROKE (MTU ?) SHOK FLSH JAVA COOK MUC LGW [IN]-DIRECT DATES PRICE COMMENT
Air France ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ?  
Delta ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? Single ?  
Continental ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? Single ? American scrambled dates MMDDYYYY not even in boxes.
Sabena ? Yes ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? MS-explorer add on front page ! Great way to deter Linux & BSD & Unix & VMS etc users
American ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? brits in mu. can't buy on web.: Residence UK, Canada or [U.S. & All Others (Non-U.S. residents can place reservations on hold for purchase at an AA airport or ticket office)]
KLM Yes (MTU ?) ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? "You have entered the application at an invalid point."
NO GATWICK BROKE SHOK FLSH JAVA COOK MUC LGW [IN]-DIRECT DATES PRICE COMMENT
Euro Wings ? ? ? ? ? ? No Both ? 322 Euro All to Heathrow.
Ryan Air ? ? ? ? ? ? No ? ? ?  
Easy Jet No ? ? ? ? ? No ? ? ? OK for Roger H.
Go No ? ? ? ? Yes No Just Stansted ? Range ? Owned by Easy Jet
INDIRECT BROKE SHOK FLSH JAVA COOK MUC LGW [IN]-DIRECT DATES PRICE COMMENT
Luxair ? ? ? ? ? ? ? Indirect ? 660 Euro Hub Luxembourg
Swiss ? ? ? ? ? ? ? Indirect ? 700 Euro Hub Multi
NO MUNICH BROKE SHOK FLSH JAVA COOK MUC LGW [IN]-DIRECT DATES PRICE COMMENT
German wings ? ? ? ? ? No ? ? ? ?  
Pan Am ? ? ? ? ? No ? ? ? ? Cant find MUC on web, thought they used to though ?
Virgin Express ? ? ? ? ? No ? ? ? ? Hub is Brussels
British Midland ? ? Yes ? ? Yes No, Heathrow ? ? ? London City Only I recall
AIRLINE BROKE SHOK FLSH JAVA COOK MUC LGW [IN]-DIRECT DATES PRICE COMMENT

KEYS

( Preferred Answers In Bold, Non preferred in Italic ).
  • AIRLINE Name & Click able Web
  • BROKE ( No / Yes ) - If I find their web at Any Stage broken, using my test conditions (which include an internal net, a proxy web server & dsl reduced currently un compensated MTU (maximum transmission unit) (to be changed later, then retest).
  • SHOK Do they want Shockwave : ( No / Yes )
  • FLSH Flashing adverts : ( No / Yes )
  • JAVA Java Needed : ( No / Yes )
  • COOK Cookies Needed : ( No / Yes )
  • MUC Do they fly from Munich : ( Yes / No )
  • LGW Do they fly to London Gatwick: ( Yes / No )
  • [IN]-DIRECT : (Direct / Indirect / Both ) : "Direct" flight to destination, or "Indirect" via a hub ?
  • DATES ( Range / Fixed ) - "Fixed" dumb single date selector or optional "Range" of dates to make finding a date easier.
  • PRICE Price above are in Euro inc MWST I presume, for a sample flight I checked 2003.07.20, of about a week including a Sat. night to get cheaper rate
  • COMMENT Other web site deficiencies. Or flight detail etc.

WHY SCREWED WEB SITES SHOULD MATTER TO AIRLINES

As a result of difficult web sites, I buy less flights than I otherwise would, probably others buy less too, &/or use airlines with easier web booking systems. Airlines would sell more tickets if they made selecting & buying a ticket less trouble !
(The alternative of phoning or going to a travel agent is not always attractive - risk getting stuck behind some long enquirer, some agents don't do the discount tickets, &/ or with a lower chance of friendly service than in the UK. has plenty of friendly travel agents, still Munich on average (not with reference to travel agents in particular) doesn't treat customers as well as South East England & London, though there are exceptions both ways, including both exceptionally good and bad service in both locations. (Each country & locality has strong & weak points, just like web sites too. In each case it's best to adopt good ideas & approaches from wherever, not to be foolishly offended when told somewhere else does something better.)
Of course airlines make more from money per head from business travellers
Many will be in a business mode: "I always travel XYZ-Air, booked by my in house travel agent" they won't care that they can't see prices, just flight times, taking the attitude "Rip my company with another scheduled flight, I'm too busy to care about price."
But there aren't enough business travellers or seats overall sold in this shrunken economy,
So airlines Should make it easier for normal people with some budget constraints to find & book a maximal number of flights per year.

AIRPORTS

TRAVEL AGENTS

OK there's tons of 'em with web too, for now I'm just listing two
  • .Reise Bar: A new integrated coffee, cake & travel shop, opened mid July 2003. Email Holzstr 19, Tel 089 55062244, Fax 089 55062246. Open evenings till 20:00.
    They use a telnet type application (so no server resource consumed with graphics), keyboard driven cryptic CLI (command line interpreter), (maybe direct into Amadeus ?) much faster & more efficient than fumbling with a mouse in a web browser (though the browser could have been running a terminal emulation, but that would make no difference to the principle).

    My ticket (177.98 Euro) (from http://www.reise-bar.de) was issued with a free ticket from FTI Frosch Touristik GmbH which covered free travel to & from airport (saved 8 MVV stripes each way). Sadly theyve long since stopped that.

  • Travel Overland They have a search engine attached. It was rather slow & tedious though, clicking on price categories & dates in vain hope. After investing the time to write this web page, I actually Gave Up ! & used a human instead of a machine
  • flug.de Search engine ? rec. by hansfield@yahoo: "I use flug.de Have done for about 5 years, saving about 30% on most of my flights. Ticket arrives in the post the next day!"

THE DEFICIENCIES OF AIRLINE WEB SITES

Airlines are so stupid they don't learn from each others' sites. They fail to comply with basics of good design, (& by Good design I Don't mean some rubbish a graphic artist or ad. executive thinks is glitzy - I mean something simple & easy a customer in a rush can get through quickly to find & buy a cheap ticket, before customer curses, decides the whole Pain is taking too long, & gives up looking & goes back to doing some Work.

STUPID FEATURES

  • Don't Clutter Pages Too much rubbish for shareholders, flight shops & etc. The prime purpose of an airline is to Sell Seats. Everything else like investor relations is secondary (the investors want you to Sell Seats too!), & should be seperate, down the screen, in a smaller font. The airline already has the investors money & interest, & the employees's interest etc, to encourage them to work through web sites they probably half know already, but the airline doesn't have the browser customers money until it Sells A Ticket - the Prime Objective !
  • Fonts Buying flights should not be in asserted small fonts - Some use 1600 x 1200 screens (& bigger), & then fonts come out small, if asserted, so best leave fonts un asserted.!
  • Colour Don't use Blue for non- click-able text, as it's what most browsers use For click-able text. Don't use hard to read fore/background combinations.
  • Big Buy Buttons Stupidly small "Select / Find Price" buttons, make no sense !: When the customer has found his flight give him a Big button to buy the ticket with, don't make him hunt how to buy
  • Scrap Logins ! - Don't Play The Spanish Inquisition Some EG Lufthansa want to know too much about you before they'll sell you a ticket. ( They used to be so obstructive they wouldn't even tell you flight schedules before you'd identified yourself.)
  • Don't Hide Prices EG Lufthansa.
  • Don't Assume Departure Airport Mandates Choice Of Language Some assume your departure airport defines your language: Example of such naive stupidity: Air France. Not everyone flying from Germany is a native German speaker. Some may prefer English, Spanish, etc Intelligent counter example: KLM (PS & don't get stupid like Google, who assume just 'cos your browser is coming from .de, you really want to read German even though you typed google.com
  • Don't Shove Shockwave Or Microsoft On Front Page Some EG Sabena Not every browser has Shockwave or can download a compatible version to their browser & operating system. Sabena are so stupid they even promote Microsoft on their front page - 2 really dumb ways to scare off some customers before they even start.
    Shockwave Note "Why not get the flash plug in ?". Personally, I'm a computer consultant who avoids Microsoft like the plague ! . I only run binaries I've built myself from free public source code. (No viruses ! Source allows one to fix or change anything needed, no ongoing license costs & addiction/ dependency). I'm not aware of Shockwave in public source code. Linux Mozilla may supports a flash plug & FreeBSD supports Linux binaries, but that'd still be an imported binary.
  • Accept Credit Cards From Not Just UK EG not like Expedia Who don't even use a "Sorry, we only accept other cards or cheques for an extra handling fee" A friend told me later that expedia.de will take German cards.
  • Show Dates In Unmistakable Easy Edit Format EG Not like Continental Avoid American scrambled non progressive dates in strings EG MMDDYYYY not even with spaces, separators or in seperate boxes, - a great blinkered way to confuse rest of world. I guess those insular types never heard of logical/ programming & accountancy & type dates EG YYYY MM DD HH MM (which is ideal for sorted lists too)
  • Don't Make Flight Schedules Uncopyable Some like GO used to have their flight schedules as a graphical image so you couldn't mouse copy it as text for an offline copy. GO did this, they got bought out, good riddance to one more bad web feature !
  • Don't Flash Excrement Adverts Or Gimmick EG British Midland
  • Don't Excrete Cookies or Demand Java Many don't trust that security invasive stuff. I don't accept that rubbish, except in a seperate login which owns no real files, so the unwanted excrement cannot compromise my data.
  • Some web design (KISS) ideas in German language.
  • Allow Flexible Date Searches, (Not just fixed dates) Being able to click on "Look for nearby dates too" is very useful.
  • Don't Use Meaningless Fare Scheme or Product Names Many of us have no interest in learning such rubbish.
  • Tech note: IP MTU: Airlines might be wise to test after asserting a TCP MTU of 1492 (or even less), so that even those with an un compensated DSL gateway can still guarantee to select & purchase flights, even if gateway not achieving the expected MTU=1500. (Applies to GO) & some other sites (airlines & others)

Planes

Details of plane(s) that have flown this route. (So that when booking a flight you can see what you'll be travelling in).
Feel free to (mail me more planes you've used On This Route, that are Still Flying This Route, or even better, mail me URLs to other sites who will maintain better detail & save me the bother).
  • Boeing 737-300 (as used by Go.)
    • 11 in service with Go @ 8.1999
    • up to 148 passengers
    • 2640km/1650 miles
    • 2 x General Electric/SNECMA CFM56-31Cs or 3B1s each producing 22,000 lbs or 20,000 lbs thrust
    • Take-Off Speed 178 mph (285 kph)
    • Cruising height/speed: 507 mph @ 3,000 feet
    • Landing Speed 154 mph (246 kph)
    • Autoland Capability Category 3a
    • Length 32.18m (105ft 7in)
    • Wingspan 28.9m (94ft 10in)
    • Height 11.13m (36ft 6in)
    • Fuselage Width 3.8m (12ft 4in)
    • Fuel Capacity 20,000 litres
    • Fuel Consumption 3,000 litre/2,400 kgs per hour)
    • Maximum take off weight 58,000 Kg
    • Flight Crew: 2 flight crew, 3-4 cabin crew.
    • Nitrogen in tyres "because it doesn't expand" !
    • Munich 914 km / 571 miles Average 1hr 55 mins

Over booking

Some budget airlines (EG Ryan Air) have forced down prices (great!) & are now apparently worth double the stock price quotation of British Airways (amazing!). BUT they do this by over booking seats more than the traditional majors, & turning away more booked passengers. That would be fair, if it was like a hotel booking: You've booked remote by phone but haven't arrived or paid yet. But the instant they accept you money (even by credit card over phone/net) they have a binding commitment & should stick to it or pay considerable compensation. The EU commissioner is apparently trying to make them reduce their over booking quotient, but they claim it'd push up costs - tough ! One shouldn't accept money under false pretence. Don't take my word on this, I'm not well informed, & this page will Not stay current, just be aware of the issue, & obtain better info elsewhere, EG newspaper, web sites, friends experiences etc.

Corrections

Corrections to this page welcome if short & factual by email
Other than that, please don't email comment, I don't have time to answer !

If after checking, you agree the criticism of any airline web site is valid, why not mail the offending airline & ask them to fix their web site ? (webmaster@WEB_DOMAIN is defined in Internet standards as the official address for such mail). The more mail they get, the more likely they are to make choosing & buying a ticket easier.

Barbara S. recommends : a good coach service: www.nationalexpress.co.uk

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