American Airlines just started its daily service between Charlotte and Havana yesterday. The inaugural flight was less than 50% full, so I wondered how much award availability there would be. It turns out that American is showing plenty of award availability for CLT-HAV:
There’s the usual blackout beginning on December 15, but it’s wide open starting on January 1:
American is showing plenty of availability for HAV-CLT as well, although the blackout seems to be shifted back a couple of weeks. I checked British Airways as well since this should be only 15,000 Avios roundtrip and it’s showing lots of availability as well.
Can you book these online? The Points Guy reported back in June that you can’t, but that was before service had started. I’m not actually traveling, so I don’t know for sure, but American let me select flights and showed me the price and taxes/fees ($110 if you were wondering) so it’s looking good. Whereas when I selected flights on British Airways, I received a “Sorry, there’s a problem with booking this journey online” message though as per TPG this should be bookable over the phone.
Anybody headed down there? I noticed that there’s now a Four Points (SPG category 6) in Havana as well.
I noticed that too and thought about an extended weekend trip. But the $50 Visa fee and an expensive hotel market in Havana stopped me from considering this further. I’m better off traveling somewhere else.
Which category of authorized travel would you pick?
My wife’s sister-in-law has some Cuban relatives so we’d visit them and do the family visit category, assuming that one’s sister-in-law’s relatives count for that category.