The airlines that fly to Tel Aviv know good and well when they can charge exorbitant prices and block out all “saver” mileage seats. I was just able to land a saver BusinessFirst ticket for a friend to go from Cleveland to Israel for Pesach from 04/10-05/06 for just 100,000 Continental miles and $35 in tax! To buy the ticket would have been about $5,000, so he got an excellent value of 5 cents per mile.
These mileage seats will probably be gone very soon, so book now! You are able to go coach in one direction and BusinessFirst the other. Listed availability is as of the time of this posting only and will change rapidly!
You may be able to book Continental travel on these dates with miles from other Skyteam alliance partners such as Air France/KLM Flying Blue, Delta, and Northwest. Continental tickets to Israel booked via Flying Blue are just 25,000 miles each way (or 20,000 Starpoints), but Flying Blue tacks a fuel surcharge onto award tickets that the US based airlines do not.
Continental non-elite member’s saverpass availability nonstop Newark-Tel Aviv:
EWR-TLV
Coach (35,000 miles OW): 04/02
BusinessFirst (50,000 miles OW) 04/08, 04/10
TLV-EWR
Coach (35,000 miles OW): 05/01, 05/04, 05/05
Continental Elite member’s saverpass availability nonstop Newark-Tel Aviv:
EWR-TLV
Coach (35,000 miles OW): 04/02, 04/03, 04/06, 04/07, 04/08, 04/09
BusinessFirst (50,000 miles OW) 04/08, 04/10
TLV-EWR
Coach (35,000 miles OW): 05/01, 05/04, 05/05, 05/07, 05/08
BusinessFirst (50,000 miles OW) 05/06
