optimisation problem
I'm trying to figure out the best (mostly cheapest) way to get home to C'land in May/June. After getting to the airport only 45 minutes before my international flight, I swore I wouldn't fly out of Nearish Hub City again, but now I'm tempted again.
The cheapest option is bus from here to NHC, fly to Not-my-hometown, C'land, domestic flight to Hometown. For an extra $70, I could fly into my hometown or for an extra $180 I could fly out of this city (it would be $400 extra to do both, which is too much). The first two trip options are about the same duration, but I could save 7 hours by flying from this city. I'm not sure whether my time is worth $25/hour. I could fly or get a train from here to NHC for $70 more, too, which would also save some time, or maybe I would just spend some of it sitting in an airport, rather than on a bus.
In an attempt to keep my head from exploding, I'm ignoring how I'm going to get from my hometown to the other two cities where my dad and grandmother each live. I was also considering the option of getting a one-way ticket home and return back, so that it would be cheaper to go home for Christmas, but then it would only be 6 months between trips and I think I would feel guilty taking that much time off (even though time spent here is barely more productive).
Hmm... I just looked up direct flights again, and there is an option that's only $40-70 and 6 hours more than the cheapest (and longest) one I had initially.
So, now I just have to figure out when and how long I can go for... The potential dates are 2-4 weeks after I'm supposed to get the next HPV vaccine injection, so I'm wondering if any of those would be close enough that I could wait and get it for free once I'm home. In which case, maybe I should include the $150 I'd save in my calculations. The later dates would be probably too late for the vaccine, but my mum would be on holidays so we could spend more time together. Then I'd miss a good chunk of the way-too-short summer here (and the 4th of July fireworks (I love fireworks)) and get more winter instead, although it's only "winter", I suppose.
Argh.
posted by Lucy @ 3:08 PM
6
comments
6 Comments:
Seems to me that it's worth a bit of extra money to simply your travel plans. The extra time is huge, but not so much, necessarily, on top of the long trip already. Extra flights, trains, buses, and so on only increase the chance that something will screw up and fubar your entire trip.
your post made my head hurt....
have you tried kayak.com - it gives you lots of options - though i'm not sure about international stuff....
Sheepish, yeah, you're right. I missed a flight by 5 minutes last time because I was trying to do my own connections. I'm glad I found the cheaper direct flight, though.
Twirly, my original title for the post was "my head hurts". :) Sadly kayak doesn't seem to work for flights to C'land, although it did for other international flights, previously.
Yeah, I agree with sheepish. Saving money by having more connections or cheaper airlines is not really a saving if you end up stranded somewhere and having to pay for changes to your flight/hotels/expenses.
I'm usually the one who chooses bizarre numbers of connections and adds 15 hours to travel time in order to save $30, though, so don't listen to me :)
I don't if this helps, but where I live, you can often buy a travel package that you can use to book 3-4 flights for a lump sum. It works out to be less expensive when you are doing multi-city trips.
-angrygrad
Sounds like the flights from Your City rather than NHC will be the most helpful in reducing the pain of the trip. That would be worth something to me. After that, it all gets crazy -- dates, parents, vaccines. Urgh.
You can definitely count the $150 savings for the vaccine if you get the schedule right. But you probably need to decide which people you most want to see and when you can see them.
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