Another day, another major airline struggling to stay afloat. This time it’s the turn of BMI - Heathrow’s second largest operator behind British Airways, and employer of over 4,400 people. There’s another restructuring scheme underway to stem losses as the industry continues to bleed money, which is likely to lead to 600 staff losing their jobs.

BMI has already warned that it needs the best part of £200 million if it’s to continue operating in the future, following losses of £155 million last year and expected losses of up £200 million this year.

As well as the job losses (which follow recent cuts by bmibaby), BMI will also put an end to several loss-leading routes; flights from Heathrow to Brussels, Tel Aviv, Kiev and Aleppo will end in January, while its Amsterdam route will close in March and flights to Palma and Vienna will not be restarted in the summer.

[The Times]

Perhaps the most crucial step in ensuring a blissful flight experience is figuring out where, when and how you will fly. This obviously involves getting the best deal with your airline tickets, securing the most comfortable and strategic seat on the plane, and breezing through airport delays without too much stress.

So for Bitterwallet’s travel guide part 2, I’ve put together some tips which I’ve used in booking my recent trip out to Las Vegas, Seattle and LA for under £450 with multiple stops, which I hope will prove useful to some of you on how to take care of your pre-flight essentials.

1. Take your time when booking flights: They say that patience is a virtue, but when it comes to booking flights, most of us would rather book sooner than later in fear that the prices will hike up. Especially after we missed a recent airlines sale, we think the sooner we book, the better.   But you may miss a bargain like we did because of that.

Over the last 3 months, Virgin Atlantic has had about 3-4 flight sales. We missed all of them. But had we waited, their latest announcement on 30/12/08 of a worldwide flight sale as posted by Travelzoo (a great site that has a weekly mailing list telling you of the latest deals) starting from £259 could have meant even cheaper flights. Of course prices can also go the other way, so may be better to leave for holidays that could be planned at the last minute for some bargain deals.

2. Evaluate your options: There’s a reason why we love SkyScanner. Sure it’s a nifty multi-budget flight search engine, but it also appeals to our preference of arranging everything with just a couch, a mouse, and a keyboard.  However, Virgin doesn’t fly directly to Seattle, and if we just connected with the best deal we found online, it would have still costed us more than the initial direct £500. Indirect flights that would save around £100 stopped in random destinations like Detroit and North Carolina.  As my outbound would be from LGW, I discovered that it’s possible to arrange routes via both LA and Las Vegas.

3. Direct airlines may not be the cheapest option: Having never been to Vegas, I decided it may be worth a trip. Virgin Atlantic would be a direct carrier from LGW-> LAS, but the total flight price would come to £399 including tax, without our connecting flights to Vegas. So I called up 20 different travel agencies throughout the UK that are IATA certified. In the process, we discovered an agency in London with whom we were able to get multi-stop tickets for a total of £434 including tax per person.

The flight was arranged to not only stop over in Vegas for 2 days before flying to Seattle, but on the way back would stopover at Los Angeles for 4 days.  Dates were a lot more flexible than if I had tried to manually do it through multiple airlines websites. (more…)