(no subject)

[nonelvis]

I have just spent nearly an hour on the phone with my sister trying to determine our flight dates and hotel possibilities for the London trip. Virgin Atlantic is having a big sale, so we thought, what the hell, we'll book our flights tonight if we can find good pricing.

"Premium Economy," as in, "slightly roomier cattle-car," is $690 round-trip. Sweet! And then you add the $460 of taxes and fees on top of that.

Allow me to repeat that: an additional $460 in taxes and fees, or 2/3 the cost of the ticket.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA NO.

We wisely abandoned our plan to buy tickets tonight and are instead going to start looking at package deals, since you can now start booking for the early fall. We may end up having to fly economy after all, but such is life. My willingness and ability to splurge on this trip ends somewhere around the point where I have to nearly pay for an entire second ticket to get where I'm going.

Comments

[elliptic-eye.livejournal.com]

$460 of taxes and fees on top of that.

…What?

[nonelvis]

That was pretty much my response, absent a number of profanities.

[elliptic-eye.livejournal.com]

But… but how? Which side of the pond is taxing 66%, and… well… how? Do they explain what "fees" means at all?

[nonelvis]

I was wondering that myself, so I ran the same flight dates and seating level through British Airways' site and got pretty much the same amount of taxes and fees. $87 of it is a fuel surcharge, and there are miscellaneous smaller fees that, along with the fuel charge, probably account for about $150 of the extra money. What's missing, and what I think is really killing us, is probably some kind of traffic fee from Heathrow. Unfortunately, the only nonstop flights from Boston to London fly into Heathrow, so unless we are willing to risk changing planes (i.e., risking our luggage won't make it with us), Heathrow it is.

[profrobert.livejournal.com]

Try running a bunch of different days on Travelocity (international travel doesn't let you do flexible days). Look also at Zoom Airlines website. Air Canada and Iceland Air, too. Ultimately, there's Priceline.com, which (the embarrassment of Shatner to the contrary) can provide flexible and cheap flights, and you have the time to bid repeatedly.

[nonelvis]

I don't think I could use Priceline; I really like knowing in advance who I'll be flying with. And we are trying to run a few different days as options, but with Virgin Atlantic, anyway, +/- 3 days made no difference to the cost. (There's only so much we can shift things around anyway, since we are trying to book around a theatre engagement for which we already have tickets, and which requires substantial travel time of its own.)

We're also checking Kayak, because they rock. I'm a little less willing to fly Air Canada or Iceland Air only because those flights involve stopovers and/or changing planes, and the flight is long enough as it is without stopping. Not to mention that neither soccerjude nor I wants to change planes, because that's a virtual guarantee that our luggage won't make it along with us, and we don't have a lot of time in the UK to waste sitting around waiting for the airlines to fix their screwup.

I have never heard of Zoom Airlines, but I'll check them out.

[profrobert.livejournal.com]

You may need to rethink that. Usually the cheaper flights are the connectors (because people will pay more for nonstips). You might also look into the cost of taking the train down to New York and flying from JFK or EWR. You tend to get some funky airlines like Air India or Kuwait Air that stop in London on the way to the Middle East. (I was looking at Paris for the Spring, and Air India had the best price, but we decided not to go for now.) You may also find flights that go into Gatwick or Stansted. Continental has nonstops from Newark to all over the UK, for example (we flew into Manchester, and I know they go to Bristol, too), but you may then get killed on the rail fares.

You do know it's $2 to the pound, and things that cost a buck here cost a pound there? You're going to hemorrage money.

[nonelvis]

Trust me, I'm very aware of the exchange rate and how badly it sucks. But I have these theatre tickets, and I am absolutely going to England in October no matter what.

soccerjude has helpfully worked out a budget (nice to have a sister with an MSF degree), so we know what we can afford; it's just a matter of being clever about looking for deals.