Has anyone had any experience with this new airline? Specifically my daughter is flying into Aruba on American Airlines and lands at 2:19pm and she has reservations for their 4:30pm flight over to Bonaire. Also on the return she leaves Bonaire at 1:15pm and lands in Aruba at 2pm to catch a 4pm flight back to the states. Does this sound reasonable for this new airline? How long should customs take in Aruba? Thanks, Stu Slavin

Stuart -

Actually several folks in this newsgroup have experience with BonairExel.

I think if you will go to the bottom of this page, choose "Keyword Search" and enter BonairExel as your search term you should find quite a lot.

Good hunting!

Charles Poteet
Dallas

As of Jan. 1, 2004, BonairExel could not be booked by the Web-based systems Expedia, Travelocity and Orbitz. However we see that Ecowas Airlies of Lagos, Nigeria, doing business as EcoAir, is code-sharing some flights that are available through Travelocity. Prices are being marked up. Bonaire-Curaçao and return on Saturday costs US$48 plus $7 tax from BonairExel but US$55 plus $7 tax plus $5 service fee from Travelocity and EcoAir. Similarly Kaliningrad Air of Russia is code-charing some DCA flights.

See our comments at trip reports ...in about an hour

And if you want to send your money to Nigeria and Russia for airline tickets in the Antilles, have I got a bridge for you!!! Do you get to pick up your tickets at the Ecowas or Kaliningrad home offices??? Caveat emptor cubed.

Kaliningrad Air of Russia is NOT a code share (K8). They went out of business many years ago and DCA got assigned their old code. Some airline and travel systems never updated their code definitions.

I suspect the 9H airline code that BonairExel just got has a similar reuse problem.

Re: code sharing by Ecowas-BonairExel and by Kaliningrad-DCA (from Linda Richter) as mistakes.

Fascinating, if true. Since Travelocity and Expedia are the largest Web-based air travel brokers, it would certainly be in the interest of DCA and BonairExel to get Travelocity and Expedia to correct such mistakes.

In the same vein, we wonder why KLM, reported to be the main financial backer of Dutch Eagle Express, doing business as BonairExel, does NOT appear to have a code-sharing arrangement with BonairExel that is made accessible through these brokers.

Stuart,

I just got back last nite from Bonaire using the Aruba connection (bonaire exel)...the time connections will work ok for your daughter...however, she should not dally around...going thru immigration and customs in Aruba is a nightmare...it appears that several US carriers arrive in Aruba at the same time. The worse part will be getting her ticket...she will have to buy and print her ticket in Aruba...took an hour to get my ticket with one person ahead of me; almost missed the flight...the agent looks at each ticket as if it is the first one he's ever seen. BE needs to do some serious work on their ticketing procedures in Aruba...or even better, figure out how to sell tickets to people in the US directly so that we don't have to go thru their ticket counter in Aruba. The return trip from Bonaire was fairly non eventful...again, your daughter shouldn't dally...everybody in aruba who is returning to the US all leave at the same time (the US carriers all arrive and leave within an hour of each other)...the BE part from Bonaire to Aruba is easy since she will already have her ticket...the worse part is the US customs...with everybody trying to get home at the same time, the lines are long, expect a wait

No luck getting Travelocity to correct their Ecoair and Kaliningrad. I emailed them Jan. 4th and got a question back from them. I pointed out to them that the wrong names were displayed using a graphic file.

ag_k8logo_2.gif which is Kalinigrad Airlines

ag_9hlogo_2 which is Ecoair

If you click on the flight number it correctly displays the Dutch airline names. I advised them that they needed to make new logo files. That was January 5th. Nothing since and they are still wrong.