Sunday, April 23, 2006

Fly x2

Fly #1: (of time) pass swiftly. As in, “It’’s the end of April already? Two months from today I’ll be on another continent?? Only 7 more weeks of teaching???” etc. Since I’m in the mood for stats:
245 days I’ve been in Hungary so far
57 days until I’ll be in Minnesota
8 weeks of teaching
29 more actual days of teaching
11 weekdays on which I could feasibly teaching, but will hopefully instead be traveling
So it’s going to be a good spring, I think.


Fly #2: (of an aircraft or its occupants) travel through the air. As in, “Who ever thought flying home would be so difficult? Why on earth is a plane ticket so expensive, why won’t the major websites let you book a round trip ticket starting in Europe, why...” and further ranting.

Anyway, a lot of my fellow CETPers were smart and bought their tickets home months ago. For those who haven’t, please benefit from my experience. First of all, for those who are coming back next year and want to buy a ticket to the States and back, the following sites won’t let you buy a round trip ticket originating in Europe: Priceline and all it’s affiliates, Orbitz and affiliates, STA Travel, Student Universe, Cheap Tickets, Cheap Flights, Lowest Fare. So boo to all of them.

On the other hand, two awesome websites that let you compare a bunch of airfares at one time: Kayak and Sidestep. These two are great, they do all the work for you. I wish I had found them before I did all the work myself.

If you feel like torturing yourself by checking all the airlines individually, the cheapest ones I found were at Lufthansa and Air France, and Expedia and Travelocity also presented some options.

In the end, I went with Alitalia, because it was absolute cheapest. And me being the person I am, I’m willing to switch planes 3 times in order to save $50. But you might be different. Anyone who’s willing to share with me what their ticket cost, please comment.

3 comments:

Gaines said...

If you think round-trip tickets were bad, you don't even want to know how outrageous the one-way one were. I ended up buying a roundtrip ticket, the second half of which I just won't use, because to buy a one-way would've cost $700+ extra!

jeremy said...

Expedia:
BP-Brussels-ORD (Malev and AA)
Thursday June 8th
500 USD. thought that was pretty good.

lokesh said...
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