How to find cheap international flights (page 2 of 2)

Search

Topics

Home

How To

Reviews

About

Subscribe in a reader

Other IzziDs

Site Map -- Disclaimer

How to find cheap international flights

(page 2 of 2)

4. Fly to your main destination from within Europe

If you're the spontaneous type and preferably an experienced traveler, you can often save a lot of money by not flying to your main destination from the US. Europe has much cheaper discount airlines than the US, so all you really need to do is fly to a city where you can connect to your main destination with one of those cheap airlines. On Ryanair, EasyJet, or Vueling, you can often find round trips for less than $100 (sometimes less than $40).

This strategy is particularly effective during the high season where ticket prices can be almost double at certain destinations. I don't suggest grabbing a connecting flight on a budget carrier immediately after your flight from the US lands - that's a recipe for disaster. If your US flight is late, you might have a heck of a time ever getting to your main destination. What my girlfriend and I do is look for little mini vacations to new cities that we think would be fun. We search for cities we would like to see, and if one of them is much cheaper than our main destination, we look into taking a one or two day trip there before we hop on a cheap European flight to our main destination.

In the end, the price of booking the budget airline ticket and the hotel at your first city might bring the cost of your trip back to about the same as if you'd bought the original expensive ticket to your main destination. But if you like to travel and see new places, you do get to see an extra city almost for free.

We've done this once by taking a $500 ticket to London rather than a $1000 ticket to Rome. We had a great time in London. We've also applied this method domestically by going Boston->New York->New Orleans. This June, we're going Boston->Madrid->Rome, which also cut our initial ticket price in half.

Based on my experience with this cost-saving strategy, I do have a few caveats: 1) I would not do this if you can't get your US->Europe flight direct - you'll end up spending most of your time catching airplanes rather than seeing new cities; 2) I would not do this if you don't like a little extra stress, because doing this mini-vacation does complicate things and requires a fair amount of extra planning and hotel booking; 3) the budget airlines don't always fly into the main airports, so it may be more difficult to find transportation to/from the airport; 4) budget airlines are certainly less comfortable than the typical US carrier (the US equivalent would be Southwest, but I'd say even Southwest is a little better than RyanAir); 5) even if you like traveling, you probably will not like the trip home; at the end of your stay at your main destination, you'll probably be ready to get back to normal life, but instead you have to spend at least a few hours at some city you just visited - that's my least favorite part of this strategy. and 6) Like I mentioned above, this strategy is a little risky since you're not flying with the same company for the whole trip. If something happens where you're first flight arrives after your European domestic flight leaves, you could have one heck of a time (and expense) getting to your main destination. So make sure you have at least a couple days in between the flights, and don't try it in the winter months if you're flying or arriving at a place that gets lots of snow.

Previous Page

Skip to page: 1 | 2