Airfare

Unless you go crazy with your sleeping situation, airfare will likely be your biggest expense when traveling abroad. If you read my introductory post, you'll know that my trip was somewhat on a whim. I had been tossing around the idea of taking a trip to France, but I wasn't seriously considering it until the morning I bought my tickets. So how did I plan?

I signed up for Scott's Cheap Flights.

Basically the people who work for this service keep an eye out for tickets that are cheaper than average, and when they see a good deal, they send out an email about it. So I was getting emails from them maybe every couple days. This mostly works for people who don't have strict plans for a vacation already, because if you do then you likely bought your plane tickets first. But I knew that I wanted to travel some day and I love a good deal, so I thought it would be fun just to see what's out there. I actually got an email from them one morning that there was a big sale for European flights, and that was the morning I decided to buy my tickets.

I headed over to Google Flights.

I used the price graph and put in that I was looking for 7 days, and then scrolled through the dates to see which one had the lowest minimum price. I wanted to leave sometime in early-mid September, but that still gave me a lot of flexibility for my dates. I found the dates with the lowest price around that time, and then picked one that looked good. Monday, September 11 ended up being my target departure date, and since I wanted to be there for a week my return date was Monday, September 18.

I searched for those dates on my credit card rewards website.

Luckily, the prices I found matched what I had seen on Google. I chose 2 round trip adult tickets and used all my rewards points to take a portion off the bill. I didn't open my credit card specifically to buy plane tickets, it was just something I had. Since it rewards me with 2x points on gas and groceries, I always used it when I did my grocery shopping and then paid it off right when I got home. I also happened to open my card when my bank had just released them, so they were offering a special where you got 10,000 bonus reward points for spending a certain amount within the first few months. Overall I had about 23,000 rewards points saved up over a year, almost half of which were a bonus from my bank, and it took a couple hundred dollars off my ticket price.

Here's the breakdown of my tickets:

Ticket 1
Round trip for 1 adult redeeming 23,200 rewards points: $176.43

Ticket 2
Round trip for 1 adult redeeming 0 rewards points: $466.43

Total: $642.86

A couple days later, I had the nasty surprise of going to American Airline's website to look at my reservation and seeing a total price of $932.86. I saw the fine print that the cost of my tickets wasn't including fees from the airline, but I had no idea it would be a 50% increase in ticket price. Considering the fact that normally 1 round trip ticket to Paris can be $800-$1000 or more, and I got 2 for that price, I think I did pretty well. But I was still completely shocked when I saw that number. Now I know, and you do too. Learn from my mistakes.



^{*Note: I do not get any compensation from the services discussed in this, or any other, post. I am not affiliated with them whatsoever, I'm merely sharing my experiences and the tools I used.}