Thursday, June 23, 2011

Getting Moving

“A journey of a thousand miles must begin with a single step.” – Lao Tzu

More often than not, just getting the ball moving is the hardest part of getting out the door.  I won't spend too long talking about this, but I do have just a few tips for anybody looking to travel in the near future:

For students and school faculty, studentuniverse.com is great.  While it's not 100% of the best deals online, I'd say it picks up a good 85% of the cheapest prices- you can really save a lot booking with them.  Especially check out the FarePlay section of the website- if you are willing to be flexible and have a broader time range, FarePlay will search the prices at all airports in a broad region in a long period of time.  For instance, you could say, "I want to go to Eastern Europe sometime in August", and it will do all the hard sorting you'd usually have to do.  It's pretty good!

Also- don't be afraid to book two one-way tickets rather than a single round-trip ticket.  While it's not always cheaper, you can save a lot of money doing this, especially if you're flying in and out of separate airports.

For really cheap airlines, check out Iceland Air and Aerlingus.  Lufthansa also has some pretty good deals, but you need to book pretty far in advance with them.  If you do fly Iceland Air (which I did), you can add a stop in Reykjavik for up to five days at no additional cost... this is something I will definitely try next time. 

Finally, check different airports.  I've found that some airports are much, much more expensive than others.  Vienna, Charles de Gaulle (Paris), and Barcelona, for example, are all very expensive, whereas Amsterdam, Brussels, Copenhagen, and Frankfurt tend to be cheaper.  Hamburg, Munich, London, and Madrid are middle of the road.

For lodging and/or meeting locals, check out couchsurfing.org- sign up, make an account, and then you can write to local residents in each of your foreign destinations and arrange to spend a night or for on a couch, or just meet up for coffee- there's a lot of flexibility here, too.


So get to it!

2 comments:

  1. What about Hipmunk? I completely forgot about it since we went to Alexis Ohanian's talk but your blog post reminded me. I'm not sure if they do international flights either.

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