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Some time in the past, I suspect at something like a Stone Mason’s meeting, a group of very important airline bosses decided to create a union of their own. They called it the Star Alliance. Like most unions it no doubt started with a logo – individual pieces arranged into a single unified shape – but today it has grown to have it’s own aeroplanes, merchandising and website. To a compulsive traveller like me, The Star Alliance would seem the ideal way to fly around the world. A single ticket to rule an army of airlines covering a million exotic destinations. Download their Round the World planner and you can devise your once-in-a-lifetime trip down to the specific flights and meal requirements. But before sending off the itinerary please just stop. Relive my experience here then pursue it no further because when it comes to leaders of international cooperation and diplomacy, The Star Alliance make the EU look startlingly cohesive and The Coalition of the Willing positively enthusiastic.
My quest for a Star Alliance ticket starts with BMI. The last time I flew BMI, they were a tiny airline operating out from a bus shelter at East Midlands airport. Now, thanks maybe to their comrades in the Star Alliance, they are considered a major global carrier. News of this development however, may not have reached reservations. Jamie, my perky sales advisor, is a little hazy on the Star Alliance, but then he’s equally hazy on world geography. ‘Is Beijing in China?’ he asks without embarrassment as he chattily books my 22 consecutive flights across a smattering of different carriers.
A week later, and with a call to a BMI supervisor, the not unexpected truth is revealed that Jamie’s enthusiasm may of masked a lack of know how. To his credit, and with the exception of an intriguing trip he has booked for me on Star Alliance nonmember Alaskan Airways, all my bookings are on the correct flights. It’s just that they are not in the right class category to qualify for a Star Alliance ticket. I could indeed fly around the world, but the unbroken chain of single tickets Jamie has booked would cost me such an astronomical sum of money, it may indeed be cheaper to buy my own airline.
BMI could correct this but my wily supervisor has instead devised a get out. He’s noted that my flights do not start on BMI’s home turf of England, but in South Korea; the country where I have been working for the past few months. By his rules – and not I later discover the rules on the Star Alliance website which says I can use my ‘favourite’ Star Alliance member – I have to make my booking with the alliance’s Korean contingent, Asiana Airlines. I suppose by odd coincidence he is right, how could I now claim BMI is my ‘favourite’?
As I pull an order number from the machine at Asiana’s City Hall office in Seoul, the line of smartly presented representatives can’t help but keep a nervous watch on me as I wait. To secure their job at Asiana, each one has no doubt claimed they speak perfect English but not one really looks ready a test. As the ascending numbers flick up on displays at the end of each desk it plays out much like a game of pot luck and when my number strikes the tidy desk of Ms Hong her heart-stopping realization that I’m the next customer remains professionally suppressed behind a little blush of embarrassment.
Despite our difficult and stumbling conversation, with a copy of my itinerary Ms Hong organises the flights correctly and eliminates the barriers to actually possessing a Star Alliance ticket to just two. The first is that with no other way to pay, Asiana will only accept cash – so to meet our first departure I will have to speedily place my hands on just over 10,000,000 in local currency. Secondly, without cancellation, Jamie’s original booking is still perfectly valid giving my partner and I four, rather than two, seats on each flight; an error which will prevent us from even boarding our first flight.
With military-like purpose every day over the next week, I stock pile currency and negotiate canceling one of two near identical reservations with customer service advisors from all across the world. When the phone card expires, the only accidental booking I’ve left outstanding is with Alaska Airlines, but I’m satisfied that when that broad shouldered American comes to sit down next to empty seats for their flight home, they’ll appreciate that I didn’t bother.
It is with no small sense of achievement that I return to the Asiana office and lay one thousand and thirty six banknotes onto the desk of a still blushing Ms Hong. Without an automatic counter, a few giggling representatives – who are already clearly versed in the trepidations of the white man who wants to fly the world – make small piles across the desk until satisfied with their joint calculation. My ticket is then finally issued, just 8 days before the start of a 38983km trip.
When you receive a Star Alliance Round-the-World ticket you discover that it’s not a single ticket at all but a roughly stapled together book of standard tickets. Each of which, I am a little concerned to see, has been written out by hand in red ballpoint. Into Beijing with China Air – from where I feel I should drop Jamie a postcard – across Thailand and into Australia with Thai Air these tickets work just fine. Yet as soon as I stand before the desk of a western airline, check-in staff eye the hand-scribbled coupons with suspicion. Beyond the aesthetic short-comings, what really concerns them is while my girlfriend’s passport reads Miss Geraldine Clarke, her ticket – following the Asian habit of family name first – reads Miss Clarke Geraldine. As the check-out woman calmly explains, this discrepancy could mean the ticket belongs to someone else – although surely it would be easier to steal a ticket off someone else called Geraldine Clarke, than it would be to even find a woman named Clarke Geraldine. Nonetheless, she’s insistent that a complete half-encyclopedia of tickets will have to be reissued and we happen to have less than a 24 hour stop-over in Auckland to achieve it. To make sure we comply, she places a safety notice against our names on the computer; a notice which means that across this and every other continent, corrected tickets or not, airport security will be slowly rubbing their hands together waiting for us.
For reissued tickets, we immediately start at the airport office of Air New Zealand; they are, after all, the airline which is refusing to let us fly and a fellow Star Alliance member. The representative listens sympathetically to our case but on being handed the thick book of hand written tickets begins a little chortle. Our tickets are passed around the office and together they have a good laugh at the handiwork of their crazy Korean counterparts. ‘You see the problem is’, he says still with a little chuckle in his voice, ‘that we are not going to write all these tickets out again.’ These are Asiana tickets, and therefore Asiana’s responsibility to replace.
The following morning, in a tiny Asiana office in central Auckland, the Asiana representative is far from delighted to hear it is her responsibility to rewrite the tickets and I feel so foolish when she stresses that I should have checked the originals properly – especially since the mistake has already been missed by a whole Asian-sub continent of trained airport staff. However, while we kill a couple of hours, rewrite them she does and we rush back to the airport just in time to continue our journey unimpeded.
Now the next few destinations pass by without major incident, and if it wasn’t for some airlines pulling the wrong ticket of four seemingly identical copies we would have been able to board each flight without our names being read over the public address system and the threat of being off-loaded. Air Canada won’t fly us because United have the coupon, Lufthansa won’t because they pulled the wrong coupon back at the last destination and so we wait nervously in airport cafes while they sort it out amongst themselves. They are afterall an alliance.
In fact, I’m sure we wouldn’t of encountered any more problems had we stuck to the original plan. Had we not, as the Star Alliance website suggested, felt free to amend our schedule. The trouble is that when you are flying to 12 different destinations, through 22 airports, in the course of a year, things are likely to change. Budgets get under and over spent, friends change arrangements, rogue governments stage unlawful military coups. In our case we want to drop a destination and fly direct to the next. Our host has had to move house and our budget can’t handle accommodation in another expensive European city so we want to abandon Zurich. Firstly, I ring Asiana with whom I have the original booking. Asiana inform me that they can’t access the reservations data of other airlines on their computers – aren’t you an alliance? – so we will have to contact the airline in question directly. Phone that airline and they apologise that they can’t change the flight because Asiana made the original booking. Call back Asiana and they agree to change the flight but we must first ring the other airline to check availability. Do that, ring Asiana again and they want $250 for the administrative effort. I’m sorry, you want $250?. Then, all I have to do is toddle down to one of Asiana’s three European offices – the nearest being exactly 783 miles from my current location – and collect the revised tickets.
No, I quickly discover it is much easier just to change the times on the flights we already have. I still have to ring backwards and forwards but although the airline is paying more to fly us in and straight out of a destination we don’t even want go to, it’s free and doesn’t involve reissuing tickets. So to skip Zurich and fly from Madrid straight to Hanover, we do the following. Fly from Madrid to Frankfurt, from Frankfurt to Zurich, and then from Zurich to Hanover all in a single day. Naturally, the check-in staff think we’ve lost it; Lufthansa inevitably lose our luggage; and I have to bite my lip hard when I idly pick up the in flight magazine to find an article explaining how seamlessly I can travel the world on a Star Alliance ticket, but we get there and have only one more concern to address before we celebrate making it all the way around the globe.
You see, despite appearances, Asiana can’t really change the bookings on other Star Alliance members. All they can do is make new bookings without canceling the old ones, so now I am left with so many unhonoured reservations across Europe that if I were to put my hand in my pocket and take them all, I’d probably have enough air miles to do another Star Alliance trip around the world. But the question is, would I want to?
I would guess that when these airline heads had their first meeting – around a heavy oak table in a shadowy room within the hidden dungeons of some old European capital – they anticipated these problems and constructed their infallible defence. Because even though I can fly on their planes, buy their merchandise and surf their website, the Star Alliance it turns out, doesn’t really exist. It is something of an enigmatic post-modernist concept. It has no office, no phone number, no customer service employees and certainly no complaints department. It is a massive, logistically-complex carrier of the world’s global air traffic, but simultaneously – as one member’s representative explained to me – nothing more than a logo.
There is nothing then I can do. I might as well blame the clouds or complain to the wind. Perhaps by chance one of those airline heads will read this and in their next meeting – in the disused nuclear bunker of a former Soviet State – they’ll mention my name and laugh at their own ingeniousness. It is, I suppose, better than an Air New Zealand employee laughing at my tickets.
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- Fit to be a Bollywood Star
- Travel Technology
Copyright © 2006 Justin Firth
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