Thread or Forum for posts about flying with boats/paddles?

[JW Lester]

Though there is a site online about flying with whitewater kayaks, I was thinking we should have somewhere on Canoepolo.com to exchange information ask for help and post our experiences with flying canoepolo kit on various airlines since we need to fly often and because canoepolo boats are a bit longer than WW kayaks. Airlines charge really different amounts, some won't charge for boats (BA, SQ sometimes?), and some even charge extra for paddles (ie. America West and Jet2.com ). I was about to post a thread in the General Polo forum, when I had the thought that it might be more useful if a seperate forum were created in which seperate threads could be used to organize information about each airline. Especially since flights to both this upcoming World Championships and the next non-Europe WCs are tricky this would be useful both for international level players and also for people looking to make training trips etc.

Let me know if y'all think think this would be useful - I'd be willing to help organize it.

John

[Miguel]

There is a thread called flying boats: http://www.canoepolo.com/forum/showthread.php?t=992&highlight=companies

where there are some posts with info (last one was written by John :) )

Could be very useful info.

[JW Lester]

Thanks for that ;) While such threads are useful, I was thinking more of a place for people to post their experiences with different airlines in a more organized way. That thread is a little hard to sort through, and it's hardly complete. Imagine if the thread included posts about 50 airlines??? You'd never find anything.

I was thinking about this recently when several USA players were trying to book flights for a wedding in Ireland and a tournament in the UK. We had no way of knowing what experiences people had with some of the airlines that fly both to the UK from N. America and also between the UK and Ireland. We knew anecdotally that in the past, Aer Lingus refused to fly boats at all. I knew that most of the low cost carriers (easyjet, jet2 etc.) at least professed to fly boats and that mainline UK carriers (BMI, BA) were supposed to be very good and perhaps didn't charge at all - at least for WW boats. Without any specific information from other paddlers, though - the experiences we'd heard of regarding flying to Ireland put some of our team off from taking their boats over, and made things more difficult.

I could put a page up myself to collate information from people similar to the WW page which is only infrequently updated and not well used, but it seemed to me that a self-updating (assuming people used it to post their experiences) website such as a forum here with seperate threads for each airline would be a better way to disseminate info to the canoepolo world.

:twocents:
John