If Man Was Meant To Fly...

I realize I’m in for a reader revolt if I don’t quickly get to the goods. Which is:

What good is it describing the places to go without describing how to get there, affordably?

The truth is that travel to Europe was, until fairly recently, cost-prohibitive under most sensible family budgets (not that that stopped me). Fuel prices and a weak Dollar piled Euro onto Euro. Luckily for us in 2016, we have an oil war going between Saudi Arabia and Iran, and an intractable economic and currency situation in Greece: Europe may never again be as affordable as it is now. I mean, this may all blow up in WWIII or Great Depression 2, for all I know, but let’s not worry about that.

Regardless, getting to Europe is still not "cheap". Airlines have only slowly lowered their fares, as they would prefer to keep capacity low relative to demand, and reap the profits. It’s not totally unfair: Airlines are notoriously boom & bust, they need to make hay while the sun shines. They can’t easily reduce capacity when a downturn hits – they’re still paying the lease on that 777 regardless of whether it’s flying.

So, for the moment, fares are still moderately high, and you’ll need strategies for getting over the pond without breaking the bank. I’m going to lay out a few assumptions in the process:

1.) You have kids, so you can’t fly off-season. Otherwise, it’s an easy game – easier, that is. Getting a cheap ATL-PAR flight in early December isn’t particularly hard. Too bad many of us just can’t pull us kids from school for a week or two without consequences.
2.) You don’t live in NYC or DC, which are major transportation hubs. NYC-LON has occasional fares so low that you can get away for a long weekend, and make it worth-while.
3.) Comfort and duration plays some role in your flight decision. This will rule out some services, especially Priceline: I used them once and snagged a cheap-ish flight. We were routed BHM-DFW-MXP (Milan) which added about 8 hours total to what I would have booked by myself. Not worth the $200 total savings, according to my wife.
4.) You don’t have a ton of Frequent Flyer miles to splash. That I’ll cover in a later post.

A few words on airline pricing. Airlines do their best to defy predictability. They have sophisticated models and algorithms designed to maximize their per-flight revenue. You’ll have a hard time outguessing these, even with today’s tools.
But their computers are not infallible. What you have working in your favor is competition: airlines are sensitive to competitor pricing, and one carrier publishing a sale on a particular route will often cause other carriers to match. This match often happens automatically through the system’s computers; carriers do monitor these and will manually correct anything that’s artificially low – or, sometimes not. If you’re lucky, and quick, you can find these deals. But they come with caveats, so you want to be careful.

In the old days, you would have to rely on a good travel agent to make recommendations for you – and often their expertise would help you find a good deal. Today, travel agents barely exist for the public (they’re still there for business travel, but their focus there is more on making sure the trip goes smoothly: cost is secondary). They’ve been replaced by the multitude of search engines and aggregators, which made some sense. Search and book, and cut out the middle-man. Unfortunately, most of the tools available are totally inadequate when it comes to dealing with the airline’s current pricing models. And that’s not likely to change: airlines will always do their best to stay a step ahead of the aggregators. In the worst case, airlines actively work with the aggregators to inflate pricing. Consider: how does Travelocity make money? Do you pay them? Somebody does, and if it’s the airlines, who do you think will come out ahead, you or them?

So I no longer bother with Travelocity & Expedia, much less Orbitz and CheapO. They all use the same search engine, and are decidedly lacking in tools. You pretty much have to search one departure-destination combo at a time, and one set of dates. Not helpful.

Kayak was, for a while, a better model. For all I know they also use the same search engine, but they came out with a fairly useful tool that’s still worth checking. The “Explore” tool lets you enter a departure location, a travel date range (either a specific month or a season) and then shows you, on a map, what kind of deals other users have booked along those lines. It is far from infallible: for one, it will list the lowest fare someone has found, but you have to drill down to find out that that fare included a 32 hour layover in Kiev (this is right out). And it only shows what Kayak users have booked: I booked directly with Delta for my upcoming flight, and got it for $500 less than the Kayak listed deal. Still, Kayak can serve as a pretty good visual for what kinds of fares can be had. Recall above: airlines tend to match deals. If you see ATL-MAD (Madrid) pop up on the cheap, then it’s worth exploring. It may be a competitive hot-spot.

The best site for researching flights is Google Flights. Google acts on its own: it has cash to burn, so it’s using the site to drive eco-system traffic in a larger war with Facebook – it doesn’t need a back-door deal with carriers. And it uses projects like Flight as test cases for engineering concepts. As such, their interests are more likely to align with yours, and not the airlines. Of course, it's capturing all your data, which it will use for its own nefarious purposes later on, but that's later. Live in the Now.

On a top level, Google Flights does the same as all the other sites – enter a route and date pair, and up come the flight options. Where Flights shines is that it gives you easy view into different travel options. You know you want to go to London this summer, but what are the best dates? Google can pull up a grid view to show a full week range of combinations: e.g., June 3rd to June 14th, or June 1th to June 15th, etc. And it’s easy to scroll through to cover the entire summer. This is key, because the price on a flight can vary dramatically based on the departure and arrival combination. You can save hundreds by shifting your travel days a day or two on both ends. Google will also clue you in on this when you make a basic search, but the calendar grid view is so powerful I go to it right away.
The other very useful tool is the destination map. It works a lot like the Kayak one – enter a departure point and flight dates, and then scroll the map to see prices for different destinations. The advantage over Kayak is that these are current airline prices, not what someone got recently. It’s much more accurate than Kayak in that regard. I almost always end up toggling back and forth between map and grid view, trying different combinations. Google has other tools, but these are the most powerful. Try them out for fun. In the next post, I’ll try to give you my method for using these tools most effectively.