Need some advice about booking plane tickets

In My Humble Opinion
1

The backstory: My friend and I plan to take a trip overseas next year. We’re very flexible about when we go; anytime from March until August will do…we do, however, need to know our exact travel dates before the first of the year, to ensure that we get the needed time off from work. The flexibility of our travel dates lets us avail ourselves of such services as Cheapflights.com, which allows you to enter departure and destination cities, tells you when it’s cheapest to go from A to B, and allows you to book the tickets if you wish. It’s very open-ended, and I like it for that. The problem is, it just isn’t open-ended enough.

You see, in addition to not caring when we go, we don’t particularly care where, either. England, China, Switzerland, France, Japan, Australia; it’s all the same to us. Neither of us has ever left North America, and we can have fun pretty much anywhere doing pretty much anything, so we ain’t picky. In fact, there are just two things stopping us from picking dates, walking up to the ticket agent at the airport and saying “Here’s $1000, we have passports, surprise us”: desire to avoid being killed in the third world, and desire to save money.

First question: To that end, the sort of service we’re looking for would allow us to search for tickets with a set of very vague criteria. We want to input something to the effect of “okay, we know we’re taking a nine-day international round trip, we’re leaving from Roanoke Regional, and we’re doing this between 3/01 and 8/31 of 2007”, and have it return a list of the most, er, economically advantageous possibilities for us. Does anyone know if such a service exists?

Second question: Because the answer to the first question will inevitably be “No, now hie thee to a travel agent”, how the heck does one find a good travel agent, and what exactly do they do? If we went into an agent’s office and posed the above question, would the agent – after he/she got done looking at us strangely – be able to do anything more thorough than pick random destinations/dates and see what turns up (in other words, the same thing we’ve already been doing on our own time)? We really do want to know the full range of what’s out there.

If anyone has any suggestions for two eager, if cheap, newbie world travelers, please advise…and thanks!

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Roland–

So you’re taking your first trip out of the country. Good for you! I hope you have a blast. Let us all know where you’re going and when, once you get your plans sorted out. We Dopers have to know these things!

As far as your desire to save money goes–As you may already know, your biggest expense will most probably be the ticket itself. Almost all of your other expenses will be pretty cheap in comparison (at least, they probably will be if you go to any of the countries in the so-called “third world.” Since you’re looking to save money, I assume you’re not going to Switzerland or Monaco on your vacation.)

The first thing you’ll want to do is come up with a list of places you’d like to go. I’d make that list no more than, say, 5 countries. If you go in the months that are considered summer here in the northen hemisphere, I strongly recommend Brazil.

Anyway, once you come up with your list of countries, you’ll want to take a look at good travel guides. (You could probably get away with standing in the aisle of your local bookstore and quickly flipping to the half-page or whatever of each guide that has the information you want.) Most of the good guides will tell you about discount ticket sellers or agents that specialize in travel to the country the guide covers.

A little googling will help you figure out which agency you want to buy tickets with. Some creative googling will also introduce you to agencies the guidebooks didn’t list. If you’re interested in going anywhere in Central or South America, I strongly suggest getting in touch with Costamar (I don’t remember the URL off the bat; if you Google them up, I’m sure you’ll get it. The formal name of the business might be Costamar Travel Club these days.) Their customer service is on the rough side, but they deliver the goods. They seem to me to have the rock-bottom lowest prices on trips to South America I’ve seen.

If you see discount tickets to the Bahamas, don’t take them. Yeah, the flight itself will be cheap, but, if what everyone who’s been there tells me is true, everything else is incredibly spendy.

If I remember right, you’re a student. Or you were one, anyway, and are still in your early- to mid-20’s. If that’s the case, your local STA travel agency might help you, too. They’ve got special youth and student deals to help you get out of town. They can also sell you a membership to Hostelling International. Depending on which country you go to, that could help you out quite a bit. So could an international student (or youth) card.

Your trip sounds really exciting! Let us all know how it goes. Best of luck.

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Oh, and if you and your friend hie yourselves down to your local STA, you could probably have a conversation with someone about what you want and how much money you can spend. I’ve checked out ticket prices and such with them before. Their goal is to get students and young people out of town. I’d bet they’ve seen lots of requests like yours. And I forgot to mention–they have very affordable travel insurance.

Do you have to leave from Roanoke Regional? You’ll probably shave at least a hundred and change by leaving from Dulles instead.

Oh, and a piece of advice on planning for a 9 day trip–if you’ve only got 9 days to spend, pick somewhere with as little travel time, adjustment time, and jet lag as possible. This trip doesn’t sound like the best opportunity to check out China or South Africa. You could end up tired and dragged out, very low energy, for several days. It’s probably not the time to check out the Andes, either. You might need 2 or 3 days just to get over the altitude change. Those two considerations should help you narrow your list of countries pretty quickly.

Are you planning on traveling around independently, or are you thinking of taking a tour? If you want to travel independently, at least some proficiency in the language of the country you want to visit will help you immensely. That might also help you decide on where you’re going.

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Thanks for the advice, Scribble, I really appreciate it. I’ll definitely look into the variouis agencies you mention, especially the hostel service as we might well end up in some European contrysides. That said, I probably should’ve been a bit more clear about exactly what we’re doing here.

The spirit of this trip is “a random-ass journey to a random-ass place”. We really don’t want to decide beforehand where we’re going and then make plans to go there; that’s a regular trip. We want to let fate (or Adam Smith) decide. We’ve taken road trips in this fashion before; we pick a cardinal direction, head in it, and see what we find; we avoid major cities because they’re crowded and expensive, but other than that, we don’t care where we end up. Every time we’ve done this, we’ve had a total blast. Now, we want to do the same thing, only on a larger scale and across an ocean. Therefore, the destination specialists and travel guides are right out (and on preview: tour groups? Now I finally understand why people want a Pukey smiley). We won’t be Hitting The Major Cities and Seeing The Biggest Sights; you’re talking to two guys who had the times of their lives on a five-day excursion to Kentucky.

This is why we’re looking for something that will compile the possibilities for us, and let us just kinda wing it from there. We’d be just as happy in Bumfark, Belgium as we would be in Paris or London, and quite possibly more. The nine days and the departure from Roanoke were just examples; we’re looking for something that will let us compare, say, a nine-day trip from Roanoke to Berlin in June with a two-week adventure from D.C. to Hong Kong in April. Your planning advice is very sound, I’m sure, and any sane traveler would do well to follow it. We just don’t want to. Even if we end up screwing ourselves over, and find ourselves jet-lagged, confused and disoriented in the middle of nowhere, it’ll still be more interesting to us than just following some bland itenerary, and at least we’ll have a story to tell.

Now, we may be crazy, but we’re not idiots, so we will make two particular preparations once we find out where we’re going. First and foremost, we’ll get a novice grasp of the country’s language. If we’re headed to western Europe we’ll be fine; we both speak English, I speak decent (if rusty) French, and he speaks German, so we’ll be covered as long as we keep it in the EU. If we end up in China, I can brush up on my Mandarin…I know just barely enough to not die, but I could get better. If we’re going to Japan (not likely with our budget, but we could do it if the flight was cheap), well, time to hit the books. Whatever the case, we refuse to be the stereotypical bumbling American tourists who wander around shouting “WHY DOESN’T ANYONE SPEAK ENGLISH?!”. The second is to have a list of at least 10 possible places to stay in our destination city. We don’t want to make reservations since screw reservations (too much like planning!), but that way, if we should happen to find ourselves completely hornswaggled, we can at least find somewhere to sleep.

So, with that in mind, my question still stands: how best can we book a ticket to Anywhere?

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Oh, and I probably could’ve found somewhere to include this in my massive post above, but for whatever it’s worth, we’re not going to South America or Africa. Don’t know why, but they just don’t interest us as much as European or Asian destinations, at least for right now.

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IME - I booked tickets online, the first flight didn’t take off, I had to cancel the whole trip. I was left going back and forth between airline desks trying to sort something out and getting nowhere because I’d booked my tickets online… not sure why - but there was someone else who was taking the same connection as me, he was whisked off somewhere and I was left standing in the departure lounge

No holiday and left out of pocket

Never doing that again

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How about flying to one of the big airports in Europe and then traveling randomly around that country or even the whole continent? You could get a Eurailpass and then travel randomly around Europe (although I’ve heard that Eurail isn’t a great deal). Or you could start in one of the big airports and take whatever flights Ryanair or Easyjet have that day.

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Remember that some countries (like China) require visas.