Ordinary Gweilo

According to The Times: "It had to happen.  You can now fly around the world entirely on low-cost airlines."

And most important, they mean you’ll end up with a serious bargain. For example, you could bag a fantastic trip from London to Hong Kong, San Francisco, Las Vegas, New York and back to London for an all-in fare of little more than £500 [HK$7,850]. A similar route would cost at least £1,400 using British Airways and its chums in the Oneworld alliance. 

At first, the £500 round-the-worlder will be limited to a small range of cities. You’ll fly Oasis Airlines (www.oasishongkong.com) from Gatwick to Hong Kong for £150 (including taxes), then pay Oasis another £150 to hop on to Oakland — just across the bay from San Francisco’s main airport. From there, fly to Las Vegas and then on to New York with JetBlue (www.jetblue.com; from £125). From New York, it’s back to Gatwick with Zoom (www.flyzoom.com; from £129).

Well, it’s a good hook for a story, but actually if you really wanted to go round the world, you can probably get a decent bargain from the established carriers – I’ve mentioned round-the-world fares before, and if you compare this calculation with the HK$10k fare charged by Air New Zealand then it’s not so much of a bargain.  Anyway, that’s not really the point of the article, which is more about Oasis offering flights from Hong Kong to London and (later this year) to Oakland.

Oasis seems to get a lot of publicity considering its size – some good, but also some bad as well.  Recently an Oasis flight to London was delayed, initially because of a burst tyre and then because the crew needed to take rest before they could take-off.  It’s hard to believe that a similar problem for any other airline would even make it into the SCMP, let alone in such a promiment position in the paper.

Meanwhile, they are still running a variety of promotions, mainly for business class, and mostly variants on ‘buy one, get one free’.  These work out at around HK$13k per person (return, including taxes), which makes them a reasonable alternative to ‘premium economy’ on Virgin, BA and Air New Zealand.  You get a much bigger seat, but not lie-flat, and of course you don’t get most of the frills offered on full-price business class.  Personally, I think that’s quite an attractive option.