Round The World Tickets
Flights within Europe can be cheap, confusing
If you’ve spent much time in Europe in the last 5 years or so this will all be familiar to you, but if not this might be interesting information for your RTW trip, or at least the part that skips through Europe. Last time I wrote about buses being a good money-saving alternative to trains, but in certain cases short flights can be the cheapest transportation method of all.
You are probably aware that Europe has more than its fair share of discount airlines like easyJet and Ryanair. They can have extremely low fares, but there are two things you have to pay close attention to before you consider flying your way around Europe. One is that most of these low fares are only available long in advance, at least for the more convenient flight times on each day.
Cheap fares are often at terrible times of the day
You might see a fare that’s advertised at €39 each way, but when you go to book you realize the only flight left at that price leaves at 6:30 in the morning, while the 11am one will cost you €79. If you like setting an alarm clock for 3am so you can be out of your room by 3:30 then that’s fine, but you usually have to book well ahead to get the decent flying times.
It really helps to know how these low-cost airlines work. For the most part they put every flight on sale at the same price, but after they sell a certain number of seats for a flight the price for the remaining seats goes up. So 4 months out you might be able to get a one-way flight at noon for €19 plus taxes, but after they sell the first 20% of the seats it goes up to €29 and then €49 and then €69. But the first flight in the morning might not sell the first 20% of seats until 3 weeks before the flight, and the next 20% until a few days before.
So the bottom line is the earlier you book the better chance you have of getting a cheap flight, but often you can still get fairly cheap flights even just a few days before they leave if you are willing to go at a really inconvenient time.
Check the airports on both ends
The other thing to consider is that many of the cheapest flights use obscure airports. In some cases you’ll see a €39 flight between two cities, but it will take you an extra hour on each end and cost and extra €20 in shuttle bus fare just to get from one city center to the other. When you are comparing prices of flights versus trains or buses it’s very important to figure out exactly which airports you are comparing from.
For example, you might find what seems like a cheap flight to Stockholm, but it lands at the obscure airport way out of the city that costs a fortune to reach by train. If you leave for Stockholm from another obscure airport, say London Luton, suddenly the cheap flight isn’t so cheap anymore. You wouldn’t be the first person to not realize this is happening until you arrive at the wrong airport on the day.
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