Harder to get there than before

IT’S hard to get people to the islands.

“And it is harder now than it used to be,” according to Mary Peters, an experienced American travel agent.

Ms Peters, whose Washington-area firm, Friendly Travel, concentrates on overseas bookings, ticked off a number of highly specific problems when I raised the question of air travel from the East Coast of the US to the Pacific Islands.

“First, there is the question of fre quency of flights; if something goes wrong out there, your client probably has to wait a whole day, or maybe two days, before continuing his travek “Then there is the question of time zones and schedule changes, something you find out half-way through the client’s trip, that there has been a change that will screw up all the rest of the legs of the trip. And, the way the schedules are set, you usually have to spend the night in a

(Honolulu) hotel halfway there.

“Finally, we do not have direct access to many of the island airlines’ reservation data, and we can not be sure whether we really have a seat or not.”

The last reference is to the computer system which is the heart of every travel agent’s life. Ms Peters uses the United Airlines system, to which most American airlines are connected.

As we talked over the phone she worked on an itinerary I had taken a couple of years ago, flying Canadian Pacific from Washington to overnight in Toronto, then to Honolulu and Fiji. My question was, could this still be done, since Canadian Pacific had left Nadi?

The basic computer system, to which the airlines concerned were not con nected, seemed to indicate that I could

fly Toronto-Vancouver-Honolulu-Nadi.

But it did not indicate that I would have to get off the Canadian airline in Honolulu and transfer to either Qantas or Air New Zealand. It showed there was one stop between Vancouver and Nadi, but it would not tell us where that stop was, or when it landed and took off.

She said that the difficulty in booking space sometimes suggested that more flights might be in order. She used the computer to check out availability of Qantas and Air New Zealand flights to Fiji on several days in mid-June not routinely a high traffic season and found on several flights that no economy seats were available, and on others the lowest fares were all gone. (These flights might have been heavily booked because of the International Lions Convention in Brisbane about then.) The Fiji Embassy in Washington told me earlier that one often had to book a month in advance, during the northern winter, to get an economy seat.

Ms Peters and I talked about Guam, which for decades was served by Pan-Am and was used as a hub to send people off to other islands. “But now it is hard to get there directly,” she said.

She returned to her computer and showed me that its immediate reaction to a client wanting to go to Guam was to suggest a flight via Norita (in Japan).

This is out of the way geographically and involves a five-hour layover there. Upon closer examination the computer reluc tantly admitted that there is a Continen tal flight to Guam out of Honolulu at 1 pm every day, but no flight from the East Coast of the US arrives early enough in Hawaii to connect.

We did not get into the greater difficulties of arranging flights to Kiri bati, Tonga and the Cooks from the East Coast, but she did mention that three airlines (Qantas, Air New Zealand, and Air France) offer several non-stop, eight hour flights from Los Angeles or San Francisco to Papeete.

The other opportunity was a surprise on Sundays and Fridays a Lanchile 707 takes off from Santiago and flies to Easter Island, refuels, goes on the Papeete, then returns to Chile. From Papeete, the traveller can use Air France connections which serve Boro Boro, and Noumea in New Caledonia. □