I’ll offer mine first. When I lived in southern Victoria (Aus) a few years ago, and coming up for ‘Long Service Leave’ from my job, I started cruising the airline websites for some deals to get to SE Asia for a couple of months. At that point, AirAsia were about to start flying from Avalon (AVV) and were offering some sweet deals to get bums on seats. So I snagged a seat flying direct from AVV to Kuala Lumpur, return for $179 AUD. After a few days in KL, I flew to Langkawi (an island off the north coast) for the grand total of $17 AUD.
After that, whilst the fares were still cheap to get to Thailand and some other islands south, nothing could beat the cheapness of the AirAsia flights. And might I add, they were pretty darned good for a budget airline.
Not sure if they fly from AVV anymore: I now live in the far north of Australia, and there are NO cheap airfares up here, ever
Not “cheap” as such, but just before the pandemic we were planning a trip to Australia, flying into Cairns. We got a quote for about £740 each Heathrow to Cairns.
As we looked further we realised we could put in a proper 3 day stopover in Hong Kong there and back and that increased by a whole £10 each. That was with Cathay Pacific.
$25 upgrade from coach to first class for a flight from Seattle to Vegas, because they had unsold seats available when I checked in. I easily got my money’s worth in gin & tonics by the time the flight was over.
Quite a number of years ago I wanted to fly from Dublin to Bristol and back. I logged on to Ryanair, which had recently begun to serve the route, and it quoted me a fair from Dublin to Bristol of one cent.
My first thought was “I’m not flying with an airline that flies people for one cent!”, but my second thought was “Yes, I am!”. With the booking fee and the handling charge and the airport tax and this and that that Ryanair loves to add on the whole thing was going to come to rather more than one cent but, still, remarkably cheap.
Then I went to book the return fair and it quoted me a fare of one penny (sterling). Nearly twice as much - outrageous! But I went ahead with that too. The whole thing probably came in at around €30 — I forget exactly how much.
Mind you, you get what you pay for. On the morning of the return flight, there was fog at Bristol airport and the Ryanair incoming flight, after circling a couple of times, turned around and went back to Dublin without landing. So, no outgoing flight. A long queue formed in front of the one member of ground staff that Ryanair had, and the options offered were (a) a refund of your one penny, or (b) get waitlisted for the next day’s Ryanair flight to Dublin. (I hired a car, drove to Birmingham and flew home from there.)
No I think the orignal quote took us through Singapore but just changing planes, no stopover. We’d been to HK before as a couple and thought the kids would appreciate seeing it. Glad we did, it’s all gone a bit woooah! now.
Lucky you living in Cairns. We had an absolutely epic holiday there.
Sure beats living in Victoria with the cold, wet, windy or STINKING HOT weather. Up here, it’s around 32c in summer, and around 25c in winter. It’s either raining or not. Mostly not.
A long time ago while stuck in a hotel room waiting for my car to be fixed I booked a good sale flight on TWA (I told you it was a long time ago) that got me triple bonus miles, essentially earning me another free flight plus keeping me at Gold status for another year.
Back in the 80s I flew from Newark to Denver for a job interview on a 747. The airline was People’s Express. I got a first class ticket for about $79, which was cheap, even for those days. It was a truly luxurious flight.
I’ve never flown any of the budget airlines, so I’ve never gotten a flight that cheap. But probably the best deal was to Maui back in 2005. I was just maybe a year out of college and had just moved to California earlier that year, and wanted to join the rest of my family for a vacation in Hawaii. IIRC the nonstop flight to Maui on Aloha Airlines was around $600, and connecting flights on other airlines were also in the $500-600 range. Then I tried checking STA Travel, a site (and brick and mortar travel agency, I think) specializing in student/youth travel. They found a flight on United for around $250; less than half what I was finding elsewhere, because I was still young enough at the time to qualify for a “youth” fare, something the other travel sites didn’t have a way of easily searching for.
Although in hindsight I kind of regret not just taking the nonstop even though it cost more, just because I never got to fly on Aloha Airlines before they went bust.
And perhaps not the best deal per se, but the luckiest upgrade: I was flying home after visiting family in Wisconsin last year, connecting in Minneapolis-St. Paul. Except the first leg got significantly delayed due to something one of the pilots found during the pre-flight walkaround. Delta (or probably the regional partner actually operating the flight, actually) arranged for a bus to take us to MSP instead, and I missed my connecting flight. And the only seat remaining on the later flight to Sacramento was in First Class. The ticket agent helping me seemed genuinely surprised she was able to put me in that seat, but she did. And the big seat, and the tasty beef short rib I got for my inflight meal, and complementary wine and gin and tonic I got in First class totally made up for all the other stuff that happened that day.
That reminds me of a 1996 flight I took on Tower Air, JFK to SFO. I don’t remember the exact cost, but it was only $200-300 and that was after I opted for a first class seat in the upper cabin.
Many years back I found a US Airways last minute, super saver roundtrip from US to Amsterdam for $214, so on the spur of the moment I decided to do a long weekend trip.
It was very pleasant trip until the flight home on Sep 11th 2001.
The fine folks in Halifax, were nice enough to house me for the next three day.
When I was an undergraduate at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the 1980s, I’d regularly take weekend trips home to see my family in Green Bay – it’s about a 130 mile trip, but I didn’t have a car, so my options were either (a) take the bus, or (b) find a ride on the ride-share board in the student union. Bus tickets were about $20 each way.
For a few months, in '85 or '86, United Airlines was offering an amazing price on flights between the two cities, as they had a route that went Denver-Madison-Green Bay, and they were looking to fill seats. I flew home twice that way, and the round-trip tickets were around $30.
I’ve scored some pretty good fares over the years, mostly before kids cramped our style
Milwaukee to Acapulco for $103 (ticket was $0 + $103 tax).
Chicago to Maui for $230.
Toronto to Bucharest, Romania for ~$250 (rt flight to/from Toronto was +$200 or so).
Chicago to Roatan, Honduras for $275 (shit itinerary, though)
Back in the early 1990s, I was on a project in New York, commuting home on the weekends. Periodically airlines would have sales; I once snagged a bunch of round trip tickets (about 3 months worth) for 50 bucks apiece (or maybe it was 50 bucks each way).
Every now and then I hear of some “we’re starting to fly into this city” massive deals, but it’s always either somewhere I have no interest in visiting, or would require me to travel on such short notice that the bosses would disapprove.
Around 2005, I booked a Ryanair flight from Madrid to Barcelona for 5 euros. I thought it was a fluke until a week later when I got another flight from Barcelona to Seville for 5 euros. The bus fare was 10 times that.
We have a thing in our family where the father (me) takes their children in their senior years to a destination of their choice. My daughter graduated in 2005 and really wanted to go to Italy. We live in southeastern Minnesota, so I started looking at Minneapolis flights. Just for fun, I expanded the search to Chicago; it’s only 5 hours (it’s two hours to drive to MSP). I found a roundtrip flight from Chicago to Rome via Northwest/Delta and KLM, but we had to stop in Detroit. It turned out that it was the inaugural flight from their new Detroit terminal (or some such deal).
The roundtrip fare was $258, all taxes and fees included. Then we got bumped to business class on the return trip. I told the gate agent in Rome what we paid, and she just laughed. It pays to be a bit lucky and really early at the airport.
its a 6 hour drive, or with no checked baggage you can walk into the Fresno airport at 6pm and be checking into your hotel about 8pm. The actual flight is like 25 minutes.
