Category: Travel

My flight is early tomorrow morning and I haven’t packed yet. I don’t know what I am waiting for, probably the last minute. I didn’t even prepare my “what I need to take” list. I am just sitting here in front of the TV watching an old rerun of American Hotrods (Bluebear still on the show) waiting for Nataly to come home so I can start watching Lost. I am up to episode 18 and things are starting to pick up.

Today is my last day at work before I go on my ten day vacation. Its tradition for me that on the last day at work I start locking up my stuff on the computer. I spend a lot of time on my mac at work and so accumulate a lot of items like bookmarks, files, typefaces etc.. that I don’t want to share with people at the office. The way I lock up my stuff is I create a new account which the computer will log into automatically on boot and then I set the permissions on the folders I don’t want anyone else viewing to “No Access” except for myself. Its not a full proof plan since its easy to reset the password on the Mac but its good enough for my needs. To be safe I also delete all my key chains and clear everything in Firefox.

I am traveling on Monday via Jazeera Airways to Beirut. I booked the tickets back in October before Jazeera started its first flight so no one knew how they would turn out to be. So far I have heard a lot of positive reviews on Jazeera. I heard the service is friendly, the planes are very clean, the seats are all leather and the in flight food being great. I also heard one negative review which I believe is just a rumor or urban legend. I heard that a lot of people are getting to the airport and finding their seats canceled. I doubt that is true and the person who told me this never flied with Jazeera. Anyway I will write up a short review once I get to Lebanon and post it online.

In case you haven’t heard, Jazeera Airways has an amazing offer, for the next 3 days you can purchase tickets to any of their 5 destinations for a price of KD5 (one way). I calculated a 2-way ticket to Lebanon including all the taxes and the total amount came to KD32 ($109) which is like wayyyy cheaper then anything else. It’s even cheaper then taking the bus or your own car. I tried to find the offer on their website but its not there, you can only see the price when you are trying to book. My friend recently travelled with them and he was very satisfied. [Link]

Was just checking how much two tickets to Beirut would cost with Middle East Airlines after the new tax increase. The price for 2 tickets to Beirut would cost KD290 with MEA. With Jazeera it costs KD164.

Thats a savings of over KD120!

Here are the prices for round trip tickets including all the taxes:

Kuwait – Amman – Kuwait: KD76
Kuwait – Bahrain – Kuwait: KD33
Kuwait – Beirut – Kuwait: KD82
Kuwait – Damascus – Kuwait: KD70
Kuwait – Dubai – Kuwait: KD66

Jazeera Airways seems to be all the buzz lately, I was a great fan of Kuwait Airways but it seems lately they have turned into trash (last time I used them was 4 years ago). So me and Nat were planning our trip to Lebanon on Christmas and I decided to give Jazeera Airways a shot, I was impressed.

I went to the Jazeera Airways website to check out the prices and stuff when I noticed a button to Book a flight. I clicked on it out of curiosity and started filling up some forms. 10 minutes later I had purchased two, two-way tickets to Lebanon. The whole process felt like I was ordering movie tickets online, it was too easy. The coolest part about the whole thing was I was actually able to book my seats on my flight to Lebanon and on my flight back to Kuwait. No one else had purchased or booked tickets for the two flights I was on so the whole plane was empty and I was able to get 2 seats on row 10 for the trip going and coming. When I was done paying for the tickets I received an email with all the details about my flight, my reservation number and my invoice, its like shopping on Amazon.

The booking and paying online, plus the fact I could reserve my seats ahead of time had already impressed me, but the biggest seller was the price. Two, two-way tickets to Lebanon cost only KD164 (with taxes and everything) during peak season. Kuwait Airways or Middle East Airlines would have cost around KD135 per ticket and they wouldn’t have allowed me to reserve my in flight seats ahead of time. So thats a total saving of over KD100 which I could now spend on 600 bottles of beer or 4 bottles of Jack Daniels at B018.

The only downside to Jazeera is that if you want to eat on the plane you have to pay for it. They serve cold sandwiches and drinks but they are not free which I don’t really think is a big problem anyway. For those of you who want to travel in style and not economy, for an extra KD26 per ticket per one way you can sit in first class. That would put the price similar to the Kuwait Airways or MEA regular economy ticket price though.

Finally, I called them up a few times on the phone (177) for details and info and the people I spoke to were very friendly and polite which made me feel more comfortable. Now the only thing left is to fly with them, my flight is in December so I will review it when I come back.