Air Travel

My partner and I departed the Rome airport (FCO) for Seattle (SEA), with a one-hour layover at Paris’ Charles de Gaulle airport (CDG) along the way, on Sept. 25, 2015.
The FCO-CDG flight left 40 minutes late. The flight gate — whose number was not even announced until well past the scheduled boarding time — consisted of little more than a corridor in a lower level that led to a bus that took passengers to the plane. The bus made about four trips to transport everyone.

US and Cuban authorities signed an agreement on Feb. 16 to allow US-based commercial airlines to apply to institute flights to Cuba, with service to begin in fall 2017.
Current US laws still do not allow for tourism to Cuba by Americans, and those who wish to take the flights must fall under one of 12 categories of people for whom travel to Cuba is legal, including Cuban nationals, people visiting relatives, those on educational visits, those on chaperoned “People to People” itineraries, etc.

Dear Globetrotter:
Welcome to the 482nd issue of ITN, your monthly foreign travel magazine.
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While traveling through the Middle East in mid-June 2015, I had a chance to see the beautiful new Amman Queen Alia International Airport in Jordan. It is especially nice.
In the business-class lounge, the seats are comfortable and the meals quite sufficient. Located on the second floor, the lounge also has an information desk, with the shopping floor accessible below.
A taxi can take you into the city, 20 miles north, to one of many hotels. The one I chose was the InterContinental Amman (Jabal Amman, Amman, Jordan; phone +962 6 464 1361, www.ihg.com), where I spent the night.

In August 2015, I flew to East Africa on a Qatar Airways Boeing 777 in business class. Here are a few comparisons of that flight with my flight to South Africa on Delta Air Lines in August 2014, also in business class on a Boeing 777.
With Qatar Airways, I flew from New York’s JFK, with a one-night layover in Doha, Qatar, and a stop in Entebbe, Uganda, before the final stop in Kigali, Rwanda. My return was from Kilimanjaro, Kenya, to New York’s La Guardia, with a stopover in Zanzibar and an overnight in Doha.

Low-cost Icelandic airline WOW Air (phone, in the US, 866/512-8364, www.wowair.us) will begin flying from San Francisco (SFO) and Los Angeles (LAX) airports to Reykjavik, Iceland (KEF), in June 2016. WOW Air began flying out of Boston Logan (BOS) and Washington Dulles (IAD) in 2015.

At least nine Taliban fighters attacked Kandahar Airport — a military and civilian airport in southeastern Afghanistan — on Dec. 8, killing at least 37 people and seizing hostages. The battle lasted for 26 hours until the Afghani army was able to fully retake the airport. The airport also houses a NATO base. Kandahar is the country’s second-largest city.

When you check airlines’ websites for airfares, most websites put a “cookie” on your computer. Each website uses the cookie to track your habits on subsequent visits.

I have found that I’m shown the best airfares when I visit the site without a previous cookie or without providing my frequent-flyer number, which can be added upon making a purchase. So after I do a search, I delete the cookie. 

On Dec. 15, Kuwait Airways ended the New York (JFK)-to-London (Heathrow) leg of its Kuwait City-New York-London-Kuwait City circuit rather than allow Israeli citizens to board its aircraft. The airline’s JFK-Heathrow flight often was cheaper than flights of other airlines.