PIT to MCO in December

[jd99]

Any other Pittsburgh people out there trying to figure out what to book for an early December trip to Disney? Will USAir still be flying there nonstop? Will USAir still be in business? What happens if I book and they aren't? We are a family of four, including a six month old for whom we buy a seat, so this is not a cheap venture....Because of the baby, I really wanted to go nonstop..but with USAirways problems I don't know if I should just suck it up and book NWA or Delta 1-stoppers now or hold out a while longer before booking. Any other ideas out there?

 

[safetymom]

If USAirways goes out of business by December other airlines will honor the tickets. But there would have to be seats available. I think they will still be around come December.

I fly them all the time. The front line employees are the best!!!

 

[jd99]

I have more than 100 K miles that I can't even use for this trip because they limit the seats available to the extremely early ones (leaving orlando at 5:40 a.m for example) and that just isn't going to cut it with a baby. I have watched the daily non stop flights from PIT to everywhere disappear month by month...thus I doubt that i will still get one in Dec to orlando.

 

[safetymom]

For lots of great information on the airlines and using frequent flyer miles I suggest you look at www.flyertalk.com

 

[DebbieB]

I am also planning PIT/MCO on Dec 4, returning Dec 10. I've been watching the prices, they have been around $290, which is about $50 to $100 more than I usually pay. I'm taking my mom and she's not in good health, so I don't want to commit to it now. She has frequent flyer miles but the only flights the last time I checked were 6:00am connections through Charlotte both ways. Air Tran is about $215 with 1 non-stop each way but I am leary of Air Tran, they pulled all their flights to Philadelphia with about 1 days notice a year to two ago. I almost booked them for our trip last month but they changed their non-stop return from 2:45pm to 8:30am. Luckily one day in March, USAir dropped from $690 to $251 and I booked it (3:55pm to MCO, 2:45pm return). Hopefully USAir will keep most of their non-stops. They are always full flights.

 

[jd99]

the advice Safetymom, I am pretty well versed in using my FF miles when it is plausible....i've taken the family to Maui, Grand Cayman, Aruba and a number of lower 48 trips as well using miles over the past five years. USAir right now is making it impossible to use miles for trips to orlando.

 

[MrsJ Henry]

OK I'm confused.
We booked our flight through USAir a couple months ago and we are using our FF miles. There was no issue at all.
I had not heard that there was a possibility of USair not being around anymore. I will confess that I have not been keeping up on anything like that but now I'm a little worried. We are flying to WDW in November. I'm hoping we will not have any problems.

 

[DebbieB]

FF availability varies with day of the week and the city. We travel Saturday to Friday, it's always hard to get a FF ticket on Saturday. The last time we got them, we flew down on Friday instead, good excuse for an extra night . I have found that they add additional availability closer to the date if they have available seats. I snagged a FF ticket in February for April 21 to 25. The only return flight for the 25th was the 7:10pm non-stop, which is exactly the one I wanted!

USAir will probably go into bankrupcy again to force the unions to make more concessions, but there is no talk of them ending service. Here in Pittsburgh, the big news last month was they are downgrading PIT from a hub to a "focus city", which means big cuts in flights this fall. They are going to feed more flight connections through Philadelphia and Charlotte instead.

 

[CaliforniaDreaming]

We're going down for NYE, and US Airways has been running $560/pp since the dates first came out. I was disappointed when AirTran first released the dates, they wanted $510, but one afternoon, it went down to $220, so I booked it. Right after that, I checked, it went to $280, then the next day it was back to $510.

In the past we've always flown US Airways, but this time it'll be AirTran. If US would just lower its fares, I'm sure most people in the 'burgh would travel with them, but if they keep them high, there are other airlines out there. I'm just keeping my fingers crossed that AirTran keeps their non-stop flights to MCO!