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OpenSkies is a subsidiary airline of British Airways that has been set up to take advantage of the Open Skies agreement between the US and Europe.

The Open Skies agreement began in March and Air France have fired the first salvo into BA's Heathrow heartland with flights now operating from London to Los Angeles.

With airlines outside of Britain looking to operate flights from Heathrow, BA will compete with Continental European airlines with OpenSkies flights operating from European cities.

As well as operating from Paris, OpenSkies plan to expand services to other European cities including Amsterdam, Brussels, Frankfurt, Madrid, Milan and Rome.

OpenSkies Website

OpenSkies begin flights on June 19 between New York JFK and Paris Orly, and the website is now taking bookings. It is a beautiful looking website for an airline site. It's not cluttered like, say, Ryanair (which looks more like someones Myspace.com page), and it has a soft font in the web 2.0 style. It even has a blog.

Making a booking is simple enough as well, (though how hard could it be seeing they only have two destinations at the moment).

I tried out the booking facility to see how it works and, most importantly, check out the fares. I scrolled through many dates and already the restricted economy fares have sold out.

I found an economy fare for $285 before tax, but that disappeared before I got to the booking stage. I did find two fares for $315.50 each way before tax.







The total fare for New York Paris return was for $745.03.

I then compared this fare with flights on the same date found on comparison site Kayak.com.

For the same airports (JFK - ORY) the OpenSkies flight also shows up (as a British Airways flight). Searching for flights from all New York and Paris airports shows only one cheaper flight (with Air India).





So price wise OpenSkies is competitive. We wait for June for flight reviews.

Labels: airlines, new york, open skies, openskies, paris

Posted by James Clark - editor of itravelnet.com
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