Search my site


Facebook Twitter Couchsurfing Google Profile RSS (Blog Posts) E-mail Me Trazzler Stumble Upon Sosauce Hostelworld Image Map

Entries in budget (2)

Tuesday
Mar092010

Dear Gabbey: How do you score SWEET flight deals?

Dear Gabbey, I’m going to New Zealand to snowboard sometime this summer (their winter). I have no idea where to start with finding a flight and would like some help.  Do you have any tips? – Jenny

Jenny, dear - I am Gabbey… of course I have tips. Finding cheap flights can be a daunting task, especially when you’re travelling to locations you are unfamiliar with. I have a certain set of steps I take to find cheap flights and I’ll go ahead and outline them for you now.  There are plenty of other ways to find cheap flights, but this is my method – take it or leave it.

Situation #1: You know where you want to go and (roughly) when

If you don’t know about Kayak, it’s fantastic.  It works whether you are traveling domestically in the US, from US abroad or even between international destinations.  Although the premise of Kayak is simple, finding the cheapest flights on it is not necessarily straight forward. If you already know where you want to go and when, the search process is easy.  Enter in your beginning and ending locations and dates.  I ALWAYS select flexible date search with +-3 days but my travel dates are usually flexible. I do highly recommend this option though. Also check the checkboxes next to “include nearby airports” and if you want, you can customize WHICH nearby airports are shown by clicking the “custom” link on top of each location.I think the “Compare sites” option is annoying, so I uncheck all of those boxes.

At this point, it is a good idea to look at the calendar shown to the right of the search boxes. 

In this case, I had asked for flights leaving the 1st and returning the 8th.  Notice that the flights at the end of this month are much cheaper (by over $200) and since I am flexible, I would rather go later in the month and save a few bucks.  I will change my dates to 7/25 outbound and 8/5 return.

Kayak then chugs and plugs and scours the internet for all things flight goodness. The cheapest flight will pop back up at the top of the list.  Make sure the selected dates hold the cheapest fares for the week.

Feel free to change the filters along the left hand side, but notice that these will usually eliminate the #1 cheapo flight. If the flight you want on is a non-stop, this is likely the cheapest flight out there.  Your journey has ended, congrats.  If your selected flight has connections, there still may be a cheaper option for you yet, or if not, at least you can make the most out of it.

Consider alternate transportation from your layover, or at least stay a couple days!

In the above example, the cheapest flight I found showed one stop on the outbound leg.  If you click the “details” link below the flight information, the details of the flight will be expanded to show where and for how long your layover is.

In this example, the layover is in Brisbane, Australia for 3 hours.  Turns out, I’ve never been to Australia, and the thought of popping into the Brisbane airport for 3 hours when I’ve come all this way, just really sucks. I wanna see a kangaroo.

Extend your layover, Option 1: Ground transportation
Sometimes booking flights to a certain airport are just pricey either because it’s a small airport or only serviced by budget airlines.  Kayak searches SOME budget airlines, but not all.  For example, you will find flights on cheap European airlines like Easyjet, but not Ryanair (though Ryanair is rumored to be joining Kayak in the near future).  You will find budget Jet Blue, but not Southwest. So let’s say you want to travel from Tokyo to Malaga, Spain.  Your cheapest option will be to book on Kayak from Tokyo to London and then to catch a budget European flight from London to Malaga. You should also look into ground transportation like trains and busses or even ferries (which can be great for traveling between locations like England and Ireland, or Spain and Morocco).

So how do you find those cheap budget airline flights when they’re not listed on Kayak? Well it takes a bit of work, but it can be done relatively easy.  I start with wikitravel.org. Wikitravel is a great online encyclopedia of location specific travel knowledge.  What I use wikitravel for more than anything else though, is to find out what airports are near a city and who flies there. Once you find a city on wikitravel, go down to the “Getting In” section and note the airports nearby (usually will be noted which are major hubs vs. budget hubs).  Visit the airport’s sites directly and find a list of airlines flying into that airport.  From there, you can visit the airlines directly and look on their “Where We Fly” or similar to figure out the best ways to get into a city.  Ya, it’s a bit of a hunt, but you said you wanted cheap, not easy.

Extend your layover, Option 2: Stay a couple days
For this example, ground transportation between Brisbane and Auckland is not really feasible (definitely not for cheaper than a flight) but I want to see the town. I redo the search, but this time I set it up as a multi-city with a stop in Brisbane and Auckland.  Los Angeles to Brisbane on 7/25, Brisbane to Auckland on 7/29 and Auckland to Los Angeles on 8/5. This search returns a flight that is $90 more expensive, but $90 and I get to add another country to my vaca? DUH! Now I am satisfied with my flight choices and move on. 

Situation #2: You have no clue where or when you want to go, you just want out

If your travel plans are a bit more vague, a good idea is to start with a couple of different sites.  First (if you’re based in the US), you should check out Airefare Watchdog. This site allows you to put in your home airport and it will send you weekly (or daily, if you’re into that sort of thing) digests of the best destinations based on years of trending data. This site is PERFECT for travelers who are based in a city but like to take spontaneous weekend getaways or don’t necessarily have a specific destination in mind.
Another great site to get used to is LastMinuteTravel.com. Last Minute Travel allows you to search for flights (or even better, packages) to certain locations at the last minute.  Ok, well not LITERALLY at the last minute, but let’s say my travel plans change, and I want to book a ticket to New Zealand tomorrow. 

Yes, that is correct; $1000 for a flight that leaves tomorrow.  Not a bad deal at all.

Finally, we head back to Kayak for their “deals” section which allows you to search for deals from a city to a continent.  I use this feature A LOT. Try searching from LAX to Europe and see what happens.  You’ll often find great packages and deals you wouldn’t find elsewhere.  If nothing else, it gives a place to find inspiration on where you actually want to go.

If you’re not sure what’s a good deal and what’s not, a good site to check out is farecompare.com which allows you to enter in a starting and ending location and will give you a range of typical airline prices grouped by travel month. 

Rookie Mistake – Hidden fees on budget airlines

Don’t look like a n00b. Budget airlines advertise discount fares often times because the LOAD on the hidden fees.  Ryanair is a prime example and the punch line of many-a-joke about hidden airline fees (from fees to use the restroom to seatbelt fees).  But you really need to take that into consideration.  Once when traveling from London to Galway, I found that I could save a day of traveling and pay only slightly more (advertised) to fly rather than boat/train/drive/bus. However, after beginning the booking process (and already having decided on flying rather than the alternative) I paid an extra €5 for them to print my boarding pass out for me (no printer), an extra €15 for a checked bag, then €30 in airport surcharges, an €8 fee to use a Visa credit card and Finally when I arrived at the airport, I found that my oversized bag was liable for an additional £56 in fees! I ended up paying double of ground transport because I was lured in by the cheap adverts.

Tuesday
Feb232010

Dear Gabbey: How do I get a [cool/awesome] site like yours?

This week's question comes to us from Cassie but is a question I get QUITE frequently from other short-term and long-term travelers out there.  It also coincides with the launch of this new website as by launching this site, I got rid of all of the "over-the-counter" blogging tools I was previously using. 

Blogging is a great tool to let people know where you are and by nesthostelsvalenciwhat you're up to when you're traveling.  When I first started blogging, while backpacking Europe in 2007, my blog was the MAIN way that I kept in touch with my family and friends back home.  At one point, I went an entire month without talking to anyone back home except for my blog and e-mail. 

"But I'm not a blogger, and I'm DEFINITELY not as tech savvy (nor as irresistibly good-looking) as you, Abbey"

Well that's alright, humble readers.  Because fortunately for you, there are a plethora of blogging tools out there just BEGGING for you to use them.  Although I have custom built this site using my brain (90%) and a company called SquareSpace (10%), it was not an easy task and I do not recommend it for anyone who is not completely comfortable coding and building their own custom graphics. However, there is still a way to get a cool blog and not fork over $1000's of G's for a pimped out site (like my own).  In addition to paying me to make a site for you, here is a breakdown of my three favorite FREE "over-the-counter" blogging tools for travel blogging.

 

WordPress.com

WordPress is one of the most popular blogging platforms out there, and it's easy to see why.  WordPress is VERY easy to set up and very easy to work (I'll insert here, as long as you don't want TOO much out of it).  WordPress also allows you to have instant access to a decent amount of built-in "themes" that can then be tweaked to fit your blog's own feel.  The biggest two strengths I see with WordPress are the extensive "widget" or add-on library and the user community.  WordPress is not going anywhere anytime soon.  The content management part of this site will only get better with time and the extensive user community help to answer almost any question out there.  In addition, because it's an open (and free) the user-developed add-on tools are fantastic, and really unrivaled.  You can add maps, polls, graphs, quizzes, about me pages, and much more with just a bit of techy knowledge (like... how to drag something and drop it somewhere else).  I realize not all of us were gifted with such technical ability (like my mother - Hi Mom), but fortunately, most of us were.  Stephanie, over at Twenty-Something Travel has a good example of a simple WordPress blog.  Also here's an article from Matador's Traveler's Notebook on the 20 Great WordPress Themes for Travel Bloggers.

 

Blogger.com

Blogger is, in my opinion, a more versatile platform than WordPress, but we all know that with more freedom, comes more ability to... well... eff things up.  I ran my blog http://blog.abbeygail.com/ on the Blogger platform for almost 3 years and it suited me very well.  Like WordPress, Blogger is free, easy to set up and easy to use (again... as long as you're not trying to do too much).  Blogger also has an extensive library of free "themes" which can be customized using their built in content management tools.  Blogger also gives you more flexibility if you do know how to tweak a bit of CSS stylesheets and backend html code.  Like WordPress, Blogger also gives you the ability to add custom widgets and has a very large network of users to help with support and idea swapping.  Because Blogger is a Google product, there is the potential for even more networking and development tools than WordPress and the Google Blogger dev team has a blog and a beta version of Blogger (that any one can use) that experiments with even more amounts of techy-ness. One of my favorite travel blogs using blogger can be found at A Travel Around the World.  You can also check out my old travel blog which I hosted on Blogger.

 

Offexploring.com

I save Off Exploring for last because they are my hands-down favorite pick for blogging platform for most people.  Off Exploring is SPECIFICALLY tailored to travelers.  It allows you to organize your posts by where you are, add photos, a map and videos. It also allows you to create a "Travel Plan" and display that to your readers so they know where you're headed and where you've been.  It's an easy platform, allows unlimited (small size) photo storage and as many blog posts as you like.  I used this as the blogging platform for my 2007 European Backpacking Trip and it NEVER let me down.  It's a simple enough site, so it uploads quickly (even when you're in those crappy hostel internet cafes on dialup) and it's just plain easy.  PLUS (yes, there's a "plus"), at the end of your trip, when you return home, they will even print up your ENTIRE journey, including pictures, posts and maps into a hardback book that you can then keep in print on your lovely coffee table into eternity. Amazing. Go ahead and check out my Travel Blog from 2007/08 - The Adventure Called & I Followed on Off Exploring. They've quoted my approx 140 page book published at about US$60. Not too bad, if you ask me.

The most important thing is to blog frequently and to try and capture what it is about your trip that interests you the most.  Do you want to know exactly what you ate for breakfast every day? Do you want to remember how you felt about that Italian boy you met down the street? Or would you rather just list out all the things you did see and show your pictures for you family to have proof that you're still alive?

What do you think; do you have any other great easy and free blogging platforms that you use?  Feel free to link to your own blogs in the comments section so we can see what your site looks like.