Flight Options

I normally don't hawk this sort of thing or overtly shill for products and services, but for our friends and family back home, I'm making an exception. Two pieces of news came up recently that make coming to Europe (and Germany) a little bit easier and hypothetically less expensive.

Effective in October west coast powerhouse Alaska Airlines will code share with Icelandair, and Alaska customers can earn and redeem frequent flier miles on Icelandair. Icelandair, for their part, offer flights to over 20 European cities including Paris, London and Amsterdam via their hub in Reykjavik, Iceland. This may not be the best solution for folks coming here to Nuremberg, seeing as Icelandair's closest destinations are Munich and Frankfurt. However, where there's a will there's a way-- both cities are a train ride away, and in the case of Munich, a mere 28 Euros will get two people from the Munich Airport to about 100 yards from our front door using the excellent German Rail and Nuremberg public transit networks. Icelandair flies to several US cities, but to really take advantage of this arrangement their west coast portal is Seattle.

Air Berlin, now Germany's 2nd largest airline (and Europe's 5th largest) is poised to become a full-fledged member of the Oneworld airline alliance which includes folks like British Air, American Airlines, Cathay Pacific and Quantas. Air Berlin's footprint in Europe is impressive-- we've taken many of our European jaunts using these guys-- and for a "discount airline," it sure doesn't feel like one; it feels no more cut rate than, say JetBlue. As is often the case in these sorts of arrangements, full integration of Air Berlin (and its Austrian subsidiary Air Niki, chaired by former Ferrari Formula One driver Niki Lauda) won't take place until 2012. Despite its impressive roster of airlines, Oneworld has comparatively little penetration to the European market, and regulatory hurdles and boneheaded management (US-based fliers could not earn miles on British Air flights out of America) have hamstrung efforts-- the inclusion of Air Berlin is a very savvy move. The upshot is that I can finally use my American Airlines miles, which have been gathering dust of late-- providing we're still around here in 2012 of course. Air Berlin currently flies to San Francisco, L.A., Vancouver and NYC among other places, and are well worth checking out as their fares are usually extremely competitive.