Christmas Travel, Part 2

OK, the picture book I made was nice, but the real gift for my family for Christmas this year were airline tickets. Now these were a bit unusual, so let me explain…

…as I’ve previously mentioned, most international flights don’t go on sale until 3-4 months from departure date. There are occasional hiccups further out than that, but go ahead and check it out – run a Google Flights search, oh, Atlanta to Paris. You’ll notice you can snag a $653 R/T flight right up through April; fares go up in May. Some of the reason is seasonality, for sure, but I bet dollars to donuts that, if you check again in February, you’ll see $600+ R/T for June and July.

BTW, on a previous post I also mentioned Turkish Air, they’re the ones behind the $653 fare. It’s a nice bargain, but makes it an 18 hour trip. No-Can-Do. Virgin is trying to copy it ($760 or so) but you’re laying over nine (!) hours in London. Fine, you can take a shuttle into the city for a few hours, they have that; and in my younger travel days I had a marvelous 5 hour layover at Heathrow, having sidled up to a bar and gone down the on-tap selection one-by-one. But that’s a lifetime and two kids ago. It’s definitely not a family friendly travel itinerary.

Anyway, by any rights I should have no business buying a ticket now for summer travel. Best I could do, which I’ve done before, is plan for travel over Spring Break. Perfectly good choice, but it limits your potential destinations. Anything north of the Alps/Pyrenees is dismal in late March – think 45 and rainy. You could do Paris, London, or major city destinations, but the countryside is still slumbering. And since we’d decided go to the French countryside in particular, am I not overpaying?

Possibly. But just because airfares *generally* don’t go on sale before 4 months out, doesn’t mean they might not at a specific moment. In particular, I’d been regularly checking the fares for La Compagnie, a boutique airline that flies between Newark and Paris. I’ve mentioned them before – they fly an all-business class 757 at a cut rate. Granted, it’s not 2018-level business, like United’s Polaris. It’s more 2008. The seats are *almost* lie-flat (175 degrees, they say).

The kicker is that the fares are a pretty good fraction of full business class fares. Sample: Delta One, New York to Paris, typically runs $3,300. Time it right and you can get down to $2,500. Multiplied over a family of four? $10,000 to get you across the pond in style, and just let that number sink in.

Now, La Compagnie. Their fares start at $1,800; already you have a $700 savings built in. I’ve seen, on special occasions, them offer $1,100 R/T. Very limited time and selection on those, from what I found; so, when doing my periodic check on pricing, I saw them go to $1,400 for our June dates, I locked it in.

So, on the one hand: I’m saving $1,100 on a business class ticket; I can’t (yet) imagine that the La Compagnie business class is $550/leg worse than Delta’s. You’re still in a plane, after all. I’m betting that it’s pretty darn close. That’s a good deal; really, I'm just shooting for that sweet spot where the flight is juuuust comfortable enough that we can reasonably sleep for 5 hours. Anything over that is almost a waste.

On the other hand: I could have dragged us to Paris, coach, for something like $600 from Newark. I’m paying an extra $800/person. $3,200 for a family of four. Now, think of what you can do with that kind of money. Like, spend three nights in a crazy fancy hotel in Paris – say, the George V – and still have change left over.

It’s where you value the money. Is the pain of flying coach so bad that you’re willing to trade off some really nice things to avoid it? That’s not an easy argument to make, but it’s possible. And, anyway, this was a Christmas present, remember?

The side problem is that the business class ticket is wasted on our to-be ten y.o. kids – they don’t need the space or the service (read: booze) that you get in Business. But, they’re still too young to fly by themselves back in coach, so we got to bite the bullet, for them. That will change when they’re…12? At that point I’ll be happy to let them fend for themselves while I travel up front. By 12, the airlines don’t really even consider you an Unaccompanied Minor, you’re expected to manage the flight alone.

The other side problem is that I have to still get the family from Birmingham to Newark. Yeesh. That’ll add another $300/person to the event, and it’s proving to be more challenging than I thought. More on that later.