My US Airways status

Airlines are starting to frustrate me. At the moment I have Chairman status with US Airways, but haven’t been flying much since they merged with America West because their booking systems are messed up and I’ve not been able to book certain flights online (Belize, Trinidad, Grenada etc.). This is annoying to say the least.

As far as the world's airlines go, US Airways ranks "lousy". In my opinion I see it as a lousy, terrible and worthless airline and I always question why I fly with them, and the answer is usually my status. With my Chairman status I would always be upgraded to first class, enjoy a nice meal and access to the first class lounges. My favourite being the one at Charlotte which I have spent many hours in. Although it’s nothing like the lounges that Virgin or BA have, where they feed you and internet is free, it still had one thing that I valued and that was a great smoking lounge. With leather chairs and plasma screen TV’s I could smoke a cigar, watch TV and relax between flights. But even that perk is gone. I have to pay to enter.

I complained to US Airways about this and they offered me numerous lousy excuses about how that was the way it is, yet anyone with status on a different airline going through a USAir hub has free access to the lounge. That’s right, you read that correctly. If you give another airline money but have the proper status you can access the lounge. Meanwhile, if you fly on US Airways aircraft and are a top level flier with them you get the shaft.

So needless to say, I’ve not been flying USAir as much, I decided to diversify. In fact, I’ve only earned 13,416 qualifying miles this year with USAir. I’ve flown on BWIA (Shit), Delta (nice), Liat(junk), United (nice) and American (bleh) for a total of 37,641 miles. If by now you haven’t figured it out, my dilemma is that I’m not going to make status on any of the airlines I’ve flown. It would be good to have at least some status and to do that I need to pick an airline and do a “mileage run”.

The first order of business is always to check the FlyerTalk forums, a great resource for any traveler. I saw that someone had found an obscure flight on USAir to the Virgin Islands for only CDN $238, an incredible bargain, departing from Pennsylvania. That’s not a big deal, since the routing takes me through Charlotte bumping up my qualifying segments too. The only problem: getting to Pennsylvania. Flying with USAir out of Toronto would cost about $451, driving will cost me $300 and flying my own plane would be about $1000. A direct flight from Toronto to the USVI would be $603.

And here I am, at the confirmation page, wondering if it’s really worth it to spend this sort of money to get no perks with an airline that serves no food on most First Class flights and doesn’t reward their top level fliers with simple access to their lounge.

The answer is no, it’s not worth it. I’d rather sit at home and watch TV, so I closed my online booking window and went on to write this entry.