Next Stop: Belgrade on Air Serbia

I’ve heard a lot of good things about Air Serbia: now it’s time to give the Serbian flag carrier a try.

I have been in England this weekend for a wedding and in looking at return options I wanted to try something new and avoid hefty London departure taxes.

I’ll have a separate post on this, but I tried to fly home from Dublin to Los Angeles on Ethiopian Airlines using the cancelled Bangkok reservation. Unfortunately, the carrier has gone radio silent the last couple weeks and is still holding my money.

With Dublin not an option, I decided to try out Air Serbia. Flying from London to New York via Belgrade in business class was not exactly cheap (14,834 miles for LHR-BEG and 64,082 from BEG-JFK) but the one-way ticket was over $250 in coach and $600 in business from London to Belgrade so the extra ~15K miles was not a bad deal.

I get into Belgrade in the evening and leave early the next morning. I’m contemplating spending the night in the Air Serbia Lounge then sleeping on the flight to New York. There is a Hyatt in Belgrade (I’ve stayed there before) and it is not even particularly expensive: my concern is more the effective use of time than spending an extra $100 for a hotel room. I’ll play it by ear for now.

Air Serbia operates from Terminal 4 at London Heathrow and uses the Etihad Lounge, so it will be interesting to see what kind of cutbacks have taken place at this lounge since I was there a year and a half ago. If I have time, I will also visit the two Plaza Premium Lounges and the SkyTeam lounge.

Doubts

I must admit, I am experiencing some serious doubts about this trip. First, the 79K AMEX points (to Etihad) it took just to get me to New York could have got me from London to Frankfurt to Los Angeles on Lufthansa, with FRA-LAX in first class. There was award space available and it would have been only 70K AMEX points (to Aeroplan). United was also available in business class on a non-stop LHR-LAX flight. I could have even flown London to Dublin and did the Dublin to Los Angeles flight on Ethiopian for 55K miles. But instead I’m spending more miles and only getting to New York. I’m not sure yet how I’ll get back to LA…

But you know something, it’s alright…this is going to be fun and I know most of you probably don’t care to read another Lufthansa First Class trip report. The flights between JFK and BEG on Air Serbia all have award space — every single date, it seems. I hope this will be a helpful review.