The Journey (United Kingdom and Ireland): Flights

This post is a little different. I don't have any new trips to log, but I am planning a trip this fall. I am planning to go to the United Kingdom and Ireland. We are calling it The Journey. I just wanted to write a little post about that.

About nine months ago, I was with a friend and she asked if I wanted to go to Europe. Of course I did! I didn't take it that seriously when she said it, but I emailed her a bit later and she was serious. At the time, I was thinking perhaps we could go in two years, then I could take my time saving and mostly because planning a trip to Europe seemed daunting! However, after some discussion the idea was that we should go as soon as possible. At first we set our sites to spring of this year, but later we changed it to the fall. We didn't really want to go in the summer for several reasons: the weather, the crowds, and the costs. So we determined that spring or fall were the best times to go.

I am glad we changed our dates from the spring to the fall, mostly because by the time we were ready to buy tickets I realized we missed the best prices! I had been keeping an eye on the prices for a few months at that point, they held steady for the most part, but went down at the end of October, mostly because I think more airlines set their 2016 schedules which added more flights and more competition. I was mainly looking at Norwegian, as well as a few sites like Kayak for prices. Then, in early November the prizes jumped up. Not a significant amount, but after seeing how low the prizes could get, I was a little frustrated. Luckily, we did decide to go in the fall, which allowed me to revamp my strategy. In February, I started looking at flights for the fall, using different scenarios for dates and destinations in order to figure out which was the best. We didn't necessarily want the least expensive flight, especially if they were 36 hours, but we did want to find a good deal.

I found a lot of interesting things. First, most of the best deals are out of airports on the East coast. There are some good deals from California, but for there are more deals and often better deals from New York. Also, if you try to get a flight from the West coast to the East coast, then to Europe, it doesn't save you any money and sometimes it is more expensive than flying directly.

By the end of March and beginning of April we had our dates set, so I looked up flights on Kayak, Google and Norwegian every day for a few weeks. I started to see a pattern. When the flights went up on the weekends, and then dropped dramatically on Tuesdays and Wednesdays, I knew what my strategy would be. We were able to get good flights with one stop each way, one to Ireland and one out of London from United.

Anyway, I learned that it pays off to be vigilant, to have a plan, but also to be flexible, and don't wait too long to buy flights. Flights are still by far the most expensive part about The Journey, but they were much more affordable than I had thought, and well worth it.