I looked at Orly. Not a good option from California for my dates. Just checked again and not only are there no nonstop flights, all the options served up by Expedia are multi-line. And I’ve never heard of an airline called French Bee. Just looked them up…OMG, they have six airplanes. I’ve never seen an airline that tiny before. But they are cheap - $1500 for LAX-ORY-LAX.
As for getting from airport to Disney - CDG wins that one. Ten minute ride on the the TGV to the next stop vs an hour and a half on a shuttle then two RER trains? Eww. I can’t imagine trying to wrangle a family on what look like commuter trains with transfers. Hopefully they take the Magical Express bus instead.
Would you be traveling with kids on this trip? (If you mentioned that upthread, I missed it.). If so, multiply the issues with jet lag and logistics that have already been mentioned.
I went to Disney World twice in 1999, but I hadn’t planned on it originally. The first trip was scheduled about a year before and then I ended up scheduling another trip with a group of friends and my future bride. I enjoyed myself both times though.
If I’m visiting France I’m not going to Disney. I want to go see and experience things in France that I cannot do in the United States.
I almost always fly United and other than on one leg once their planes have seat back TV screens with hundreds of movies. They also all have USB ports to charge phones. The few times I’ve flown Delta or JetBlue they also have seatback TVs.
I’m not a fan of Disney, though I wouldn’t mind a trip there to experience it. But I would relate it to a trip I may take, such as a ski trip in CA and the Alps. If the CA trip was close, like day trip range then yes I would. I would consider it a trip to the Alps, and yes a separate common day trip, no problem. But if it were traveling quite a bit for one day in CA then most likely not and I would tend to try to get the whole trip in the Alps.
I have found quite the opposite, Paris is a fairly cheap entry from NY area to main land Europe and actually I hate this because I don’t want to go there to get to other places, but it’s cheap so I do, and I commonly have come in at under $1000 per ticket, always have had access to overhead bins and have paid the upcharge for seat selection on flights that don’t include that with standard ecco.
As to @squeegee’s rebuttal, I agree that non-US carriers’ long-haul coach is better than US carriers’ long haul coach. As they described. No doubt about that. And as I said, I was talking only about US carriers’ long haul coach. Which is, other than the food, just about exactly like their domestic narrowbody offerings.
As to seatback TVs, the whole industry is moving away from them. They’re being removed during cabin renovations, at least in coach. Everybody already has their own TV in the form of a tablet or phone. And with the Wi-Fi on the plane, every domestic flight has a couple hundred movies, 10,000 hours of fresh TV, 50 channels of music, etc. Anything you could see on the seatback device you can also see on your phone / tablet.
I will say that if somebody is or has been flying in the US only on one of the dedicated discount carriers, which includes Southwest (even though their fares are not nearly as discount as they used to be) that’s much less true. Those planes tend to be pretty frill-free and very high density seating. The RJs connected to one of the majors. e.g. American Eagle, Delta Connection, etc., are an intermediate case. But still towards the low-frill / low-space end of the spectrum. Which fits their original design intent of flights with no more than 40 minute air times. But doesn’t really fit with the 3+ hour flights many of them now routinely fly.
But if you’re on genuine big American, Delta, United, JetBlue, or Alaska, it’s pretty as I’ve described almost without exception.
Huh, that surprises me. I wonder how many people know how to access this stuff onboard? I was surprised that my second-leg Tokyo to Thailand flight (what I’d consider short haul internationally, only 7 hours! ) had wifi that apparently did nothing, no shill screen to sell me shitty internet, nothing. Maybe I wasn’t clued in to how to use it for entertainment. There were also very small seat back screens, but I just read a book instead.
I guess I’ll take you at your word. I’m certainly not jumping on a SFO->Newark flight to find out how good the USB plugs etc are. My last 3 hour-ish domestic flight sucked in all the ways discussed.
NYC has many more options than Boston; of the roughly 10 destinations that we get for non-stop flights Paris is on the higher end. Looking at the fare map for NYC-> Europe, Paris is clearly near the bottom of all destinations. Big advantage of being near such a major hub.
Looking at LAX-Paris the cheapest two flights are the aforementioned French Bee and Air Tahiti Nui. The next cheapest flights (Delta and Air France) are twice as expensive.
At least for the major domestic carriers over the last several years, they’ve been pretty good about trying to give you that information ahead of time.
United, to use the last few times I flew, provided that information via email when confirming the reservation and a couple times before the date. That same information was provided at the airport and before the flight took off. It does require downloading the United app before taking off, so that could trip some people up. Of course, that requires you bring your own headphones and a charging cord is recommended (not all aircraft have power at every seat yet but it’s increasingly available). I’d say at least half the passengers if not more were plugged in most of the time. Several of the flights also had the seat back displays for anybody who wanted to use them.
It only makes sense. I imagine they’re very interested in passengers having something to occupy them rather than bored and apt to potentially lash out.
Seatback devices are FAA- or EASA-certified avionics and cost serious money to buy, have crappy reliability needing frequent repairs, and cost money to cart from city to city in extra fuel burned on every flight. And are functionally obsolete by the time you get them installed on even half your fleet.
Once we’re using the passengers’ devices as the display screen, the first two costs are transferred wholly to them, and the last cost becomes zero since we’d still be burning fuel lugging the passenger’s devices whether they’re using them or not, and now we can leave the seatback and all its weight stuff off the jet.
For the semi-private pods in full-bore business class or higher, having one or two built-in 18-24" screens per seat is all about selling maxo luxo to the fat-cats (or corporate folks on good expense accounts) for maxo luxo prices.
On my carrier there are printed cardstock cards in the seatback pocket explaining it, it’s described in words on the printed boarding pass and the emailed boarding pass, and there are multiple PA’s delivered before departure.
On a laptop it’s as simple as connecting your Wi-Fi to the [our airline name] SSID and opening your browser to [ourairline.com]. On an i-device or phone there’s an app for that which automates both those highly difficult steps. As @Great_Antibob just described.
Well I really hope this doesn’t become the case. The TVs are twice as large as my phone and if I had to watch on my phone I’d have to hold it up the whole time. That’s an awful way to watch a movie. The TV screen is so much better.
I just flew from EWR-LAX and was able to watch three whole films. No way would I do that on my phone.
For this reason alone, I wouldn’t do the trip. It will be too rushed and possibly stressful to fully enjoy. I admit, I’m not a Disney fan, but if I were, I would double my time at one park rather than try to cram two into one week.
Something I consider essential for airline travel is headphones with active noise cancellation. For long flights, the constant drone of white noise is maddening. Even if you’re not listening to anything through them, they provide audio comfort.
I won’t recommend a brand, but don’t buy the cheapest.
Most of the post-screen seatbacks now have a little spring-loaded bracket which will grip a standard phone in landscape orientation and hold it high up on the headrest area at eye level. I still find the screen too small for comfortable video-viewing. But they’re trying. And I see lots and lots of passenger seemingly happily doing that.
The situation with tablets is far worse; there is no suitable bracket, so you’re left with holding it on your lap or the tray table. Having a tablet with a kickstand of some sort greatly improves the situation. But for me at least that still leaves my neck bent forward staring down at the screen. Which I find is difficult for long stretches of time.
It definitely wasn’t / isn’t being done for true customer convenience.
Of course the discount and second-rate carriers who never had screens to begin with still mostly have their old pre-screen interiors that lack such brackets and may lack even Wi-Fi-based entertainment at all.
I prefer the seatback screens, but I understand if the industry is going another way. I prefer a smaller phone so watching for extended periods of time is difficult. I should be flying Emirates or Qatar Airways soon on a long haul trip, I really hope they have screens. For 3-5 hour flights I really don’t care, but 10+ it’s nice to have a screen.
Our last flight across the US was in an exit row by a bulkhead. The legroom was fantastic, but the screen that comes up out of the armrest was less than satisfying. I don’t think we’ll spend extra for those seats again.
Do you have the money and it’s not going to take a long time to pay off? Do you have the time to go? Is the Pride event important to you? If the answer is yes then go. Yeah, you’ll be jet lagged, yep air travel sucks, but that also makes life more interesting.
I did a quick look on Kayak for LAX to Paris and found some cheaper flights, 1100-1500 seemed common. I just picked some random dates though so the price could be a lot more. You might be able to find better flights from the DC or Philly area so you might want to check those out as well as Chicago and NY.
We weren’t too scared at the jet lag prospects but when it all added up to be over $12,000, we scaled it back to just the Pride Night at Disneyland in Anaheim. I can drive there in seven hours. It’s their first-ever official, whereas it’s “returning” at Paris so no being a part of history there.
If we had better advance time to plan and find cheaper airfares, or if we were brave and hoped for fares to drop closer to the dates, maybe? But the idea of stretching an ~11 hour trip into multiple days with connections is amazingly unpalatable. One “cheap” fare I saw took a staggering 34 hours. The route was something ludicrous like LAX-PHX-SFO-ORD-FRA-CDG. Nope!
My first (well, only) trip to Europe was to the UK, and I was joining a friend who was going to be my “tour guide.” She’d been many times, and her advice was to schedule my flight to arrive in the morning, then, stay awake as if it were a normal day. It was brutal, but we didn’t do too much that day, and I felt nearly normal (maybe 90%?) the next day. I’d recommend doing that as well.
Ha! Reminds me of the time I had to go from Phoenix to New Orleans on short notice, and I went via Albuquerque, Dallas-Fort Worth, and one other city I’ve forgotten.
) had wifi that apparently did nothing, no shill screen to sell me shitty internet, nothing. Maybe I wasn’t clued in to how to use it for entertainment. There were also very small seat back screens, but I just read a book instead.