AMS Hotels for non-employee nonrevs
We're doing a trip later this month that will probably have us overnighting at Schiphol a couple of times. We're parents, not employees, so we can't use the hotels available though Perks that requie employee ID at check-in. The information sheet that our son gave us about nonreving though AMS is two years old,
Does anyone know hotels that now give a discount to non-employee, nonrev's?
We can't make reservations since we're nonreving from JFK to wherever in Europe we can catch a flight, but AMS is the first flight of the day and usually has availability. It's likely that we'll end up in either AMS, BRU, MAD, or LHR - any of which are fine with us. AMS gives us the most flexibility so it is our first choice.
Lucky for us that the kids get a kick out of our nonrev travels and don't mind hanging out at the computer to relist us if we don't get on a flight. We give them a flowchart so they don't have to waste time. If we miss flight A, they list us for flight B and so on until we either get a flight or go home to try the next day.
Question from a newbie. What are TATL and FCFL?
Quote:
Originally Posted by
msynyc
That would be against he rules and we wouldn't want to get them in trouble. ^_^
Interestingly, we don't really need Travel Net until the morning of our flight. All of our nonrev is TATL and we really just care about getting across the pond. Once we're on the
We know where we're nonreving from, JFK if we're up north, DTW, MSP, ATL, JFK, and BOS in that order if we're in MSY. I have a database that has every TATL flight from each departure point along with the Aircraft type and number of Business Class seats. What gets added on the morning of the day of departure are the available and available to sell for both classes, and a number representing where we would stand on the Standby list for each flight. A simple calculation makes it very clear what the priority order is for each "block" of flights. A block represents a time window where we can only list for one flight if we haven't made it to an earlier flight. For JFK flights, we eliminate all Terminal 2 departures since you can't run back and forth from T4 to T2.
The first TATL flight of the day at JFK is 446 JFK-AMS and it's the only flight in it's time block (we've don't consider ATH). It's a great flight for us since it usually has availability and it arrives in AMS early in the morning which give us lots of options to go other places. If we don't get on, we list and check in for the next one. I might add the the GA's are very good to us and they'll let us know if we're not going to make it on in Business Class as soon as they know so that we can move on to our next choice. We also try to fly on Sat, Tues, and Wed, which seem to be the best days. Returning, we go to AMS or LHR and again, just care about getting across the Atlantic. That means we have JFK, BOS, DTW, MSP and ATL options.
We're also realistic. We went to Stockholm last month and knew we'd never nonrev successfully so we bought coach tickets (FCFL). My wife upgraded for the trip over and we got Operational Upgrades on the return - let's hear a big cheer for oversold Main Cabin.
