New Airbus Site Helps You Easily Find A380 Flights
Airbus launched its first A380 in 2007, and since then, the company has built and delivered nearly 200 of the massive aircraft. Over this decade, it has fast become a passenger favorite — from Etihad's Apartment, to Singapore's business class and even Malaysia's economy cabin. It's safe to say that the largest commercial aircraft has built quite the large fan base.
If you're one of those fans — or want to try out the A380 for the first time — there haven't been any good options to find itineraries that specifically include flights operated by the A380. You could check Airbus' site listing the A380 routes, but you'd be on your own to find and book flight options. If you used ITA Matrix's advanced routing codes to restrict flight options to only A380 flights, you wouldn't be successful at finding fares if you needed to make a connection before or after your A380 flight.
Airbus has now solved this issue with its new I Fly A380 website. In addition to having information and photos of the A380 — in case you need to be sold on the benefits of this aircraft — this website helps you easily find A380 flight options and includes a link to book the itinerary you find.
We tested the website to make sure it's coming up with the best options and fares — checking nonstop, one-stop and two-stop options. The I Fly A380 website found the cheapest published fares on each of the sample itineraries we checked. Although there were slightly less expensive options found through Momondo, beware that some of the OTAs (Online Travel Agencies) that Momondo links to have quite poor customer satisfaction ratings.
While the I Fly A380 website will give you the cheapest A380 fares, you should check flight options on Google Flights so you know how much extra you're paying to fly the A380.
For example, when I searched Austin (AUS) to Zurich (ZRH) in October, I Fly A380 presented a decent $795 round-trip option. This itinerary included flying Air France A380s both ways across the Atlantic, but the itinerary required two stops each way. When I checked Google Flights for the same dates, I found non-A380 options starting at $680 round-trip with only one stop. In this example, make sure you're okay with paying the $115 premium and making extra stops to fly the A380.
Airbus has seen a sharp drop in A380 orders from airlines, even threatening the future of the A380 program. When I toured the A380 production facility in Hamburg earlier this month, it was eerily quiet. Some A380 factory space had even been re-purposed for the much more popular A320 family of aircraft.
Now back to the tool, we noticed that the this Airbus website wisely links you directly to the operating airline's website for you to book your A380 tickets. Unfortunately, not all of these links worked during our testing, requiring manual searching and finding the A380 options on the airline's website.
If you're looking for more detail on just one A380 destination or airline, the website has a landing page for each of the 56 destinations served by A380s and the 13 carriers currently utilizing A380s.
Which carrier's Airbus A380 is your favorite?
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