If you're flying to the San Francisco Bay Area, you basically have a choice of three airports: San Francisco International (SFO), Oakland International (OAK), and San Jose (SJC). Which one you should use depends where you really want to go and how you like to fly. The calculus isn't always straightforward.

If you want to be in San Francisco, SFO is the obvious choice based on name, but in truth, OAK is almost equally convenient to downtown, while SJC is the obvious choice for folks headed into Silicon Valley, though in truth, SFO can be just as good an option for a lot of those folks, especially if you're headed to Palo Alto or points nearby. (Whew, that's a long sentence!)

United passengers will always be using SFO, so if you're one of the teeming millions who flies the friendly skies, then SFO is in your travel plans, everyone else has a choice.

My choice is usually to save money, so I like to shop around, and when you shop around, you often find that OAK is the airport you're using, since that's where Southwest concentrates its Pac Coast business, and that's where the big competition is, although a lot of folks will also find that SJC can be pretty darn competitive too, since that's where scrappy startup Independence chooses to fly, and both OAK and SJC do JetBlue.

For me, it was OAK...that's where the big savings landed me (saved almost $200 a ticket just by flying into OAK instead of into SFO), and here's what I think about doing the Oakland Airport shuffle...


About Oakland International Airport
There are basically two, interconnected terminals. Terminal number 2 is for Southwest Airlines. Terminal 1 is for everybody else. Parts of Terminal 2 are ripped up for construction. No idea what they're doing or when they'll be done....locals might know, out-of-towners might get surprised by dust and detours.

The airport has a lot in common with Dick Cheney. They've both been around for about 80 years, they both look like somebody dropped a Boeing 737 on them, and they are both well known for their dikes. Trivia Time ties in the irrelevance: Oakland International Airport's main runway is actually built on a flood plain protected by 4-1/2 miles of dike.


Flying Oakland...
Oakland isn't a gigantic airport. It's definitely the second fiddle airport in the Bay Area behind the much larger and busier San Francisco International (SFO). As a result, not everybody in the sky flies into Oakland (USAirways doesn't, Northwest doesn't), and when they do, they usually have fewer flights than you'd find taking off from SFO (United has a handful of flights out of Oakland, but they're mostly United Express flights feeding into their regular hub operation at SFO --- so go ahead if you wish, take a 10-mile flight across the bay on United Express).

Airlines flying into Oakland include Alaska, Aloha, American, America West, Continental, Delta, United, JetBlue and Southwest.

The latter two carriers are the reason why Oakland is a good choice for a lot of San Francisco Bay Area residents. Oakland often has cheaper fares than flying through San Francisco International. Southwest has the biggest presence of any airline in Oakland. That translates into huge competition. JetBlue is a good option for folks wanting to a coast-to-coast trip since their flights out of Oakland are basically only going to Boston.

Although the word "international" is in Oakland's name, they really only do international flights to Mexico. That's cool if you're headed to the sun, but if you're off to the land of the rising sun, then you're off to SFO, not OAK. The only non-U.S. flag carrier to fly into Oakland is Mexicana, and they only fly one direct route from OAK --- a daily flight to Mexico City International Airport.

Cheap charter flights are also available out of Oakland. Headed down to the beaches of Mexico but don't care for the prices that Mexicana is quoting you? No problem! SunTrips is a tour packager that operates a steady stream of low-cost charter flights out of Oakland. Take off for Cancun or Hawaii on one of their charter flights operated by Ryan International. North American Airlines is another charter operator that flies out of Oakland to points Hawaiian and Mexican. (Sheesh! Looks to me like everybody in this area vacations in either Hawaii or Cancun...)


Airport Services...
Most of the services provided at this airport are adequate enough, but just barely. The terminals are neither comfortable nor inviting, they have no upscale food services, no real retail businesses, the parking is so expensive ($19/day in the "economy" lot) that I thought they were asking for more under-the-table payoffs for corrupt House Majority Leader Tom Delay, not just usage of a parking space for a day.

I thought the baggage claim was abyssmal. Aside from being a grungy kind of area that felt like it was crying in agony for someone to show up with a bucket of Lysol, the baggage took forever to move off the plane and onto the conveyor belts. Security was non-existant --- nobody seemed to be monitoring the baggage claim area at all, much less verifying baggage claim tickets. If you've got the personal scruples of a House Majority Leader, head on down to Oakland International and pretend to be an arriving passenger, then just pick the suitcase that looks nicest to you and walk on out the door.

Trying to get a decent bite to eat in this airport is an excercise in futility. There doesn't seem to be a single full-service restaurant, much less one of at least decent quality (I think I'm becoming quite spoiled by Houston's Intercontinental Airport, with all the new food options in their new Terminal E --- including a very nice 2nd floor Pappdeaux dining room that's quiet, upscale, and surprisingly affordable).

Food services in Oakland consist mostly of low-end stands. At least the food is low-end. The prices make the Chez Ritz look positively bargain basement. I paid about $5 for a lousy slice of pizza, since the pizza stand was basically the only food-serving establishment open in the morning. The pizza was horrible --- it tasted like poison (and such small portions too!)


Getting To and From the Airport...
Oakland International Airport is located at waters edge of the San Francisco Bay about 10 miles south of downtown Oakland. If you're driving, just take I-880 south from Oakland (or north from San Jose) and then when you get around 98th, follow the signs onto the glide path.

There are shuttle vans that will take you to downtown San Francisco for $25 (www.shuttlepro.net), though a taxi will probably be more like $50 and a limo maybe $70-80. There's also a shuttle bus (called AirBART) that will take you to the BART subway station (Colliseum stop) for $2, then it's probably another $3-5 to get downtown --- a little inconvenient, but probably the cheapest ground tranportation option short of trying to thumb it. Locals might know of other ground transportation options...


Bottom Line...
Oakland International Airport is a small, cramped, unpleasant airport with mediocre services. Yet it has something truly wonderful about it....low fares. I don't choose which airports I fly through based on how nice they are or how modern they might be, I choose airports based on the availability of low cost flights coupled with the cost of ground transportation and hassle factor to get to where I really want to go. In the case of Oakland, it's really no harder and no further to get between the airport and downtown San Francisco than it is using San Francisco International Airport. It might cost me at most about $10 in taxi fare difference, but that's chump change compared to the ability to save $100 or more per ticket, which is what flights via Oakland can often do for you.

Do I like this airport? No way! Will I use it again? Is the Pope German?



Recommended: Yes