How We Do Travel The Way We Do
I have friends and family asking us all the time now, “Where are you going next?”, “How do you take such long trips?” and “How did you get roundtrip airfare to Europe for just $400 a person?”. I hope this blog helps answer a few of the questions we are being asked.
We dream of going to certain places and then we try to make that happen. Sometimes certain places are just not in the budget. For example, Paul has always dreamed of going to Australia so we made that finally happen this year; however, while we were in Australia, we thought we could also go to New Zealand but it was not monetarily feasible. We thought we were not going to be able to afford the trip at all when we saw that round-trip airfare to Australia was over $1,500 per person. However, after Paul started researching options, he discovered that there was a way we could fly from Atlanta to Kuala Lumpur for just $787 a person round-trip. After we got there, we could take another flight for just $185 per person to Australia. We added a couple of other destinations (Bali, Singapore and Bangkok) in between our flight to Australia and our return to Kuala Lumpur for the long flight home. In the end, the total cost for all of those flights, for each of us, was the same as the original $1,500 round trip to Australia that I mentioned a minute ago.
When traveling internationally, we’ve definitely found that the most imposing expense is the airfare. That’s why we spend so much time figuring that out to begin with. We work from the outside in, finding the best flight for the long-haul portion of our trip and booking that first. Then we add our next destination, and the next, and the next, until we’ve filled out all of our transit hops. Most of the time those are flights between major cities as that seems so far to have been the most economical option, but we’ve done a train or two and a bus once in awhile for inter-city transit. So, our approach is to look for deals and ways to get to our final destination for less money. In the end, we discovered new countries and cultures that we would not have been able to enjoy unless we were doing this.
We are able to take long trips because I am a Realtor and can take calls anywhere in the world; whereas, Paul is a manager at an insurance company and has been at his job for many years. Therefore, he has been able to accrue around 6 weeks vacation/ sick time a year. We conserve his days and try to just use his vacation/sick days best we can for vacations. Also, some of our vacations are work related so that doesn’t count against Paul’s yearly vacation allowance. My daughter and I have gone on his work trips and just added a few days at the beginning or end to enjoy together as a family.
Sometimes we don’t know where we want to go, we just decide that it’s time to plan our next trip and we begin to plan based on the approximate dates we want to travel. The research begins by spending some quality time on Google Flights, where we search for the least expensive & best fit for airfare. Given the dates, we use the Explore Destinations feature that gives us some prices based on our dates and departure city.
I mention departure city simply because we have been able to snag some real deals by flying out of an airport near our home. I recommend deciding how far you are willing to drive to an airport then search all the airports in your driving distance as your departure airport. For example, we live in Pelham, Alabama. We have a local airport, Birmingham-Shuttlesworth International Airport that is just 25 minutes from our house. Sometimes we can find deals leaving from this airport but most of the time it is must more cost effective to leave out of the large international hub of Atlanta, Georgia. Atlanta is just 2 ½ hours from our home and has great Park and Fly areas available for long vacations. It does save us on parking when we can leave from Birmingham as we can get family to take us to the airport, so we have to factor in the cost of parking as well.
We always search a few other airports such as Nashville, Houston and Orlando. Orlando and Houston are both about a 9-10 hour drive from home but we never mind driving that far for a good deal. We flew out of Orlando last May for $400 flights round trip to Manchester, England. For our Europe trip, we wanted to land in London as our first stop but we found that landing in Manchester was much less expensive. Being just an hour and a half bus ride from London, we found that to be a solid tradeoff for our ultimate travel destination. And, as we wrapped up our vacation in Rome some two and one half weeks later, we simply flew back to Manchester, stayed the night and caught the return leg of our round-trip flight.
Understand that Google Flights is not failsafe. Not all airlines allow their fares to be searched by Google or any other airfare aggregator. Southwest is a perfect example of this, and other low-cost carriers around the globe have opted not to publish their fares to these search engines either. But for an excellent, general purpose search that will get you some great options, Google Flights is hard to beat.
I’ll expose more of our bargain-hunting secrets in other posts, but I hope this gives you some ideas on how to shop for the best airfare deals and make your travel dreams a reality.
