The Amazing Race 35, Episode 4

Can Tho (Vietnam) - Ho Chi Minh City (Vietnam) - Jaipur (India)

Airline routes and connecting flights

The first task for the cast of The Amazing Race in this episode was to fly from Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, to Jaipur (Rajasthan), India. That’s an interesting challenge, given that there are no direct flights between SGN and JAI airports.

[Map from FlightConnections.com of scheduled airline routes to and from Jaipur (including seasonal routes).]

At the start of this season, viewers were promised a return to this sort of air travel challenge, with cast members allowed to make their own choices of scheduled airline flights instead of travelling together on a chartered Boeing 757 as in the previous two pandemic seasons. Despite that teaser, we weren’t shown anything of how the racers went about choosing flights, although we were told that they all ended up on the same flights. Nor were we told what route they followed, although we were given a possibly misleading glimpse of a Malaysia Airlines plane taking off from the typically overcrowded Tan Son Nhat Airport (the former Tan Son Nhat Airbase) in Ho Chi Minh City. With the entire cast on the same flights, they would have made a substantial group, but they don’t seem to have been spotted by Amazing Race groupies anywhere en route. Perhaps if they weren’t being filmed while changing planes, they were taken for just an ordinary American tour group.

That leaves us to figure out for ourselves what the racers might have done, or — more important — how best to go about a task like this ourselves, especially given the crippling of the route-finding and comparison-shopping tools that a travel agent would once have been able to use to help us (as I discussed last week).

Airline routes used to be fairly stable, which made them relatively easy to learn and remember. Memorizing key airlines’ route maps used to be a required part of the training for agents at the travel agencies where I worked. It was much more common for new routes to be (gradually) added than for service on an established route to be discontinued. And most international flights connected national “gateways” rather than provincial airports.

None of this has been true any more since the COVID-19 pandemic. Airlines have drastically redrawn their route maps to reflect the pandemic and post-pandemic shift from business travel (replaced in significant part by virtual meetings) to leisure and visiting friends and relatives (VFR) travel, with different origin and destination patterns. Flights on many longstanding routes, including some formerly high-travel business travel routes, have been discontinued or substantially reduced in frequency. And with the pandemic having made travellers willing to pay more to avoid changing planes in a crowded and potentially “superspreader” hub airport, and “low-cost” airlines looking for underserved niche markets without competing direct flights, there are many new direct international flights to secondary airports. The growing number of these “low-cost” airlines means that more and more of of the available possibilities involve connections between flights on non-allied airlines that won’t show up in the offerings from any one airline. Knowing what connecting flight options might exist is far more difficult than it was just a few years ago.

If you want to fly from A to B in a hurry, and there are no direct flights from A to B, or if you aren’t in a hurry and are interested in where you might (depending on the rules of the fares) be able to stop over along the way without drastically increasing the price, one way to start is to look at the lists of airports with direct flights from A and from B, and see which airports show up on both lists.

In theory, you could connect with one change of planes through any airport with direct flights from and to your origin and destination. Sometimes seats will be available by way of a non-obvious connection point even when direct flights or those via major hubs are sold out. And some airlines have expansive routing rules allowing you to connect, on a through fare, through almost any airport they serve.

Shortly before the pandemic, I flew from Houston to San Francisco by way of Aspen, Colorado (ASE). Aspen is about as much of a dead end (an “outstation” rather than a hub, in airline lingo) as an airport can be. A mountain off one end of the sole runway means that planes have to turn around and take off headed back in the direction from which they arrived, regardless of the wind direction. It’s served by only “regional” jets and smaller planes, and has no jetways. You walk from the terminal to your plane, and board up a flight of movable stairs.

The Aspen airport isn’t “on the way” to anywhere else, and nobody changes planes there. But that day, I needed to get back to San Francisco for a medical appointment the next day, and no seats were available on direct flights on United Airlines or on flights through the other obvious United hubs (Denver, Chicago O’Hare, or Los Angeles). But United Express has commuter-jet flights (operated by codeshare subcontractor airlines) in and out of Aspen from its hubs in both Houston and San Francisco. And in the middle of the week in mid-winter, the skiers were on the slopes, not coming or going, and those flights were half empty.

Some small airports are pretty bare-bones places to wait for a flight, but Aspen, consistent with the wealth of its clientele, is one of those small airports that seems a bit more like an “executive” terminal for passengers on private planes. The unexpected epitome of this sort of small-airport comfort is Paine Field (PAE), in Everett, Washington, which has its own plush new little terminal but uses the runways of the Boeing 787 assembly plant. It’s better than Seattle-Tacoma International Airport in every way except for its limited routes and flights and even more limited accessibility by public transit.

Even when fares and seats on non-obvious through routings are available, they can be hard to find or to book. The algorithms used by both online travel agencies and airlines to search for available flights from A to B usually only consider connection points in a short list of major hubs. A travel agent can build an itinerary one flight segment at a time, and an online travel agency could easily provide this functionality, but so far as I know, none does. And only some through fares on some airlines allow routings like this without charging a separate fare for each segment. Aspen is a luxury destination for rich vacationers and second-home owners who are willing to pay a premium to avoid having to drive from the nearest larger airport in Denver, and the fare from Houston to Aspen or Aspen to San Francisco would have been more than the through fare from Houston to San Francisco. You first have to consult the routing rule for the specific fare, and then, in most cases, call the airline or go to one of the disappearing few airport service counters to book through flights on a routing like this.

The allowable routings are part of the rules of each fare, which should be published as part of the airline’s tariff. Each airline used to be required to make its entire tariff available to the public at every location where its tickets were sold. And travel agencies had acccess to almost all airlines’ tariffs, incluidng routing rules for their fares, through computerized reservation systems (CRSs). But as I discussed last week, airlines are trying to get rid of tariffs and fare “rules” in favor of arbitrarily personalized pricing, and it’s gotten harder and harder to get information about fares and rules.

There’s no longer any good free public source for most fares and rules, including routing rules. I pay US$100/year to subscribe to ExpertFlyer.com, which has fares and their rules — including the allowable routings for each fare — for many but not all airlines. It’s worth the subscription price for me, but might not be for you, depending on how and how much you use it. If you haven’t worked for an airline or travel agency, you could easily misinterpret the technical terminology of fares, routings, and rules, making it worse than useless. Reading and interpreting fares is like reading and interpreting law, but with its own general rules of fare construction in place of the general principles of statutory construction followed by judges and lawyers. Access to raw tariff data through ExpertFlyer.com is most useful to someone like me with professional training and experience on an airline or travel agency rate desk. Even travel agencies sometimes get into arbitration with airlines as to whether they have followed the routing and other fare rules properly in issuing a ticket.

While an oddball routing can be great if everything goes smoothly, it can also be disastrous if things go wrong. Routes to and from smaller airports and/or on “low-cost” airlines are more prone to changes in schedules or complete cessation of service. If you book through connections on the same major airline, it will usually accommodate you without additional cost on an alternate routing, maybe even on a “partner” airline, if it cancels your flights. But a “low-cost” airline is more likely just to refund the money you paid for a cancelled flight, leaving you in the lurch. If you buy tickets separately for flights on two different airlines, neither of them will take any responsibility whatsoever if either or both of them change their schedules so that their flights no longer connect. I’ve known people to buy tickets months in advance for a pair of flights they thought would connect neatly, only to have one of them cancelled or the schedules changed so that a 4-hour layover became a 4-day layover. Most “low-cost” airlines, and even some major ones, won’t check bags through to or from other airlines, so you’ll have to claim and re-check your bags if you are transferring between non-allied airlines. At some airports, claiming and re-checking bags between different uncooperative airlines requires you to leave the “secure” area and re-enter it, going through immigration, customs, and security checkpoints even if you are connecting between international flights.

How do you find out whether connections like this are even a possibility? I’m not a fan of Wikipedia as a source of information about controversial topics, but local boosters often work hard to keep Wikipedia entries for individual airports up to date with lists of new direct flights, although they are sometimes slower to remove discontinued flights.

The place I usually start for airline routes, though, is FlightConnections.com. They haven’t responded to my inquiries about their data sources, but I’ve found therm accurate and useful enough to pay US$36 for an annual subscription to use the ad-free version. You can get all the same data for free on their Web site, just with ads.

Compare the route maps for direct flights from Jaipur and from Ho Chi Minh City, and it’s easy to make a short list of possible connection points: Mumbai (BOM), Delhi (DEL), Kolkata (CCU), Bangkok (BKK), and Dubai (DXB). But which would be best for the racers, or for you?

It might seem simplest to take the first available flight to your destination country, and then a connecting domestic flight to your final destination. That’s sometimes the cheapest option, but if alternatives are available for a similar price, that’s usually a bad choice.

It’s almost always quicker and easier, often dramatically so, to connect between international flights in a third country (neither your origin nor destination country) than to connect between domestic and international flights. Arriving on an international flight, and connecting to a domestic flight, usually means at a minimum having to go through immigration formalities at your first landing point in the country. You don’t know how long that might take, so you have to allow enough time for the worst-case scenario of long lines and delays.

This is why, when I’m flying between my home in San Francisco and anywhere in Europe without a direct flight, I always choose, all else including price being equal, to connect through somewhere else in Europe rather than through anywhere in the U.S. — even though many people assume that anyone flying between the West Coast and Europe will connect through Chicago or New York.

Even at the same airport, domestic and international flights often operate from different, widely separate terminals. DEL and BOM are each considered one airport, but to get between the main domestic and international terminals at either requires driving around outside the airport. The recommended minimum_ connecting time (MCT) from an international arrival to a domestic departure at DEL is at least three hours. To be on the safe side, I’d recommend allowing at least four hours for such a connection. Recommended minimum connecting times for each airport are also available as one of the “Travel Information” tabs in ExpertFlyer.com. The international to domestic recommended minimum connecting time at CCU is “only” two hours, but that’s still much longer than a typical allowance for connections between international flights at the same airport.

The remaining possible airports at which to connect between Ho Chi Minh City and Jaipur with a single change of planes are BKK (the newer of the two major airports serving Bangkok) and DXB. However, as is common with flights on low-cost-airlines and to secondary cities like Jaipur, the flights on Thai AirAsia don’t operate every day, and may not have operated on the right day of the week for The Amazing Race.

Connecting through Dubai would have added several hours of flying, and would likely have been significantly more expensive, but because of the schedules and the relative ease of connecting between international flights, it would probably have gotten the racers to Jaipur sooner.

The final puzzle is why the racers would have left Ho Chi Minh City on a Malaysia Airlines flight, rather than on the Emirates flight to Dubai. There’s only one flight a day, on only one airline, from SGN to DXB. It’s a late-night departure, at least in the current schedule, and my guess is that by connecting through Kuala Lumpur or Singapore, the racers could have gotten to Dubai sooner.