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Open Skies: Planning, booking and the concierge service

by Grant Martin (RSS feed) on Jul 8th 2008 at 9:00AM

Since Open Skies only operates one aircraft and flies one route, planning your itinerary is fairly easy. You're going to be leaving from JFK at 5:30PM and returning from Orly at 10:55 AM. With the recent acquisition of L'avion, the airline plans to increase the frequency of those routes, but for now you only have one option in each direction.

Purchasing a ticket on Open Skies is remarkably easy, with one catch – you have to go to flyopenskies.com to book your ticket -- they haven't integrated their schedule into the Amadeus network yet so you won't be able to find tickets on Kayak or Orbitz. Once at the homepage, you can easily pick your itinerary departing from either New York or Paris (with pictures, in case you get confused) and dates.

The best part about booking tickets on Open Skies is the concierge service. We're at the point in the US where many travelers expect terrible service, off-shore customer support centers and general disdain among front-line employees. With respect to this airline, take all of those negative traits and reverse them.

Open Skies' concierge service is in existence to make your travel experience fluid – not to make it frustrating. If you have any questions or concerns during your travel – at any point – you're free to call them and get some help. This doesn't apply to tickets either. In one of my several conversations with Sophia, one of the concierges, I asked if I could get a pizza delivered to the gate in Orly. "Of course," she said, "what would I like on it?"

There are ten concierges based in Germany who are most friendly and apt. At the end of my journey I really felt as though they took care of me.

Continue onward to online check in or skip ahead to:

Arrival and check in
In flight: Economy
In flight: Prem +
In flight: Biz
Transfer in from Orly
Return trip logistics
The final word