We also view the cost of the airline tickets as part of the cost of our vacation. We book way in advance and try to be flexible with dates. I completely agree that airline (and accommodation prices!) are lower in off season.
Sometimes Costco or other places have really good deals on airfare/car or airfare/hotel combos too.
Sometimes driving to an alternate airport makes sense too.
When we start thinking about a trip, the travel portion is just part of the cost.
1)Travel (car or air)
2) Hotel
3) Food
4) other expenses
Airfare usually isn’t the big part of that. If I’m going someplace for a week, and airfare is say $400/person - 2 people =$800.
If I’m going someplace touristy, I assume I’m going to be paying $130+/night for a room, $900
Food - Probably averages $35/day per person - $490
Other - car rental, enterance fees (a 2 day ticket for Disney World is $162/adult), etc = probably another $600/person
On the other hand, if I’m looking for the “get me the hell away from snow” winter break, I can spend a lot less money, including airfare, by being flexable about where and when I go. Last year, we went to Vegas for 5 days, and chose Vegas because it was one of the cheaper places we could find to go. Try Kayak.com, and start poking around, looking at different locations and dates.
It’s when you have to be at a specific location, on specific dates, that the costs really rack up.
I think some airlines like Southwest and JetBlue don’t publish their airfares on the websites like Orbitz, Travelocity, Expedia, etc. So you need to check their websites separately.
Oh, and as stated above, rentals through places like VRBO and HomeAway can be great money savers. Having a kitchen, combined with a quick trip to a grocery store, save tons of money. Each of us are allowed X amount per day for tickets, souvenirs, meals, etc., and eating at home doesn’t count toward that.
Plus, the extra space is a sanity saver. We got a three bedroom one block home off the beach in Ocean City Maryland for $1640 total for the week. That money came from the tax refund, and the spending money is saved up since last year’s vacation.
I’m not your target, because we are pretty well off. But I’ve had this conversation many times.
I know people who never eat out so they can vacation every year. I know people who feed their family of four for $200 a month - and vacation. I know people who live in hovels and vacation. Drive ten year old cars and vacation. Buy all their clothes at Goodwill and vacation. And - yes - don’t save for retirement and vacation AND put it all on their credit cards.
In other words, if vacationing is a priority for you, you fit it into your budget. If it isn’t, you buy shoes instead and everyone wonders why you can spend so much on shoes.
But that said, there are tricks. Some people use airfare rewards cards for EVERYTHING and get their airfare cheaper or free. Some travel enough for work to rack up the miles - and often use a hotel rewards program too. Some watch for alerts and fare sales and travel on short notice when a deal comes up.
We save, we buy things we need… and we prioritize the things we want. If we want to go somewhere by plane, it’s a higher priority than some of the other things we may want. So we save accordingly.
We’re kind of non-consumers though, so our spending habits are different than the average North American. We had occasion to examine our spending habits recently, we’re a marketing person’s worst nightmare. So while we’re by no means rich, we tend to have plenty for fun spending.
The other thing is, we plan way in advance and keep an eye out for seat sales. Most people decide where they want to go, book the days off work, and then try to find an affordable flight that fit$ their date$. Instead, we have a few different places in mind, and we have a vague idea of when we want to do it, then if we come a cross a seat sale - perfect! We book our cheap flights and then sort out the rest.
For example, we thought “Hey, it might be nice to go to the west coast sometime in the fall. We should go to City X or City Z.” A seat sale came up for one of our destinations, City Z, and in the right time period (you must be flying between Aug. 1 and Oct. 1). So we based our plans on the opportunity, allowing us to save 40% on air fare.
I keep forgetting more things. I know all of those things about the car, but the difference is, I am already paying some of those costs - whether the car goes with me or sits in the lot I pay for insurance, for example.
Now I just checked SW for airfare to DC for the same time frame, and it’s $200, which is a vast improvement. What does this mean, though; it says:
Business - 518 (not going to do this)
Anytime - 493
Wanna get away (web only) - 203
Does that mean I can’t specify dates on the last one.
I get where you’re coming from. I think for you, it’s a case of you can’t justify spending that much versus whether or not you can really “afford” it.
It’s part of the cost for me. Having to fly at the summer full fare economy and pay for 5 tickets between China and the US was a ginormous expense. But if I factor in the need for my kids to connect with their aging grandparents, other family, and acclimize to the US, it was well worth the cost. Likewise I flew all 5 of us from Seattle to Denver for our first Christmas in the US to be with family, and the head of the clan was elderly and in poor health. It was the chance for all 5 of us to see her before she passed away last week.
I’m very frugal by nature so it kills me to buy 5 tickets, but sometimes it isn’t the money. I’m also fortunate to be able to “afford” it although certainly not well off enough that it does not mean skipping something else. For example, we have a mini-van but no second car. I commute to work via a shuttle. Buying a second beater car would be more convenient but not worth the money.
Did you pick September at random? Did you happen to pick Labor Day weekend? I just found flights from Albany to DC, in June, for $217 / person. $230 in September, for a non-stop flight.
This is true. Although there are no guarantees, the airfare for your itinerary should drop over the next couple of months, then shoot up again a few weeks before the actual date. There are airfare predictor sites on the web that will provide a general sense of where fares are going, as well as alerting you when they go down (or up).
We flew 2 adults and 2 kids (plus one lap infant) to Disney in the fall of 2009. We paid $208 return/person direct flight (Buffalo - Orlando) on JetBlue. I think we booked maybe 4-6 weeks out. Obviously it was a risk, but when we first booked our accomodations several months in advance of the trip, the flights were more than double.
And how did we afford this? We saved for three years to do it. We’ve started saving to do the trip again in another two. It would be nice to do it more often, but it is the reality for us.
Yeah, that is a really hard hurdle to get over. Both of us come from families that just never, ever flew anywhere if they could avoid it. Vacations were simple affairs. It is very hard for us to look at, say $1000 or $2000 for a vacation and not think “Well, we could put that towards savings or some other necessary cost”. I know that the 4 or 6 days is really fun but it seems crazy to blow all that on just a few days.
Another problem is that he has a really hard time getting days off. He can’t just put in for them and expect them. I can get almost any days off, thankfully.
Chocolate, I totally picked September at random. I have this idea that it is more expensive close to the date so I picked a date far enough away that it should not be a problem.
It also depends where you travel. Most people here go south for a week every year, but they’re going to the tourist traps in Mexico and the Caribbean. It’s cheap to go there especially since doing so became so popular that travel agencies end up chartering the plane. I frequently hear of people hanging out at the resort and chit-chatting with other tourists and finding out they live 2 hours away. 
Most people don’t do a week in Paris every year.
No. If you click the link it tells you what it means: the ticket is not refundable, there’s no priority seating, and you cannot change the date of your ticket after purchase, without paying additional fees.
Oh, now that does make it hard. Can he get them if he puts in really early?
Uh, that wasn’t supposed to sound smutty.
I just looked at Orbitz for flights a month out (May 31 with a June 6 return flight) and I found a flight from Albany to Washington for $148.
There are often two or three tiers. The more expensive bookings usually allows you some flexibility. If you’re a business dude that has to fly to meet a client at a power meeting, it makes sense to have more flexibility. Meetings get rescheduled, you get a scheduling conflict, markets collapse, etc. You pay a higher price for the piece of mind of being able to reschedule your flight to a different time or day (or month) without a penalty.
The cheap seats that we sometimes book give you no such options. Get the flu and can’t fly that day? Tough titty. Your loss. Miss your flight? Too bad. Sucks to be you.
My mom gets senior citizen tickets that are both cheap and are open ended tickets. She gets a return ticket and can come back whenever, she just has to call ahead to book her actual seat on the plane.
Some bizarre ideas in this thread about credit cards and vacations.
Rule #1 of credit cards: Don’t put anything on them you couldn’t pay then and there if they didn’t take credit.
Rule #2 of credit cards: DO put EVERYTHING on them that you would be buying anyway. This: Builds credit. Lets you keep your money ~30 days longer than you otherwise would (a marginal amount of interest accrues). Costs nothing. Let’s you rack up whatever kind of bonus things you credit card gives you.
So carrying this back to vacations and affording them… a lot of credit cards will let you pile up airline miles or some equivalent by using them. If you’re serious about vacations, it might behoove you to find one of these cards and use it according to the rules above. This will help you pay for your airfare (or you hotels if you pick a card with that kind of benefit, etc.).
Otherwise? Shop smart. Get bargains on airfare. Find cheap but acceptable hotels (I stayed in downtown San Fran for less than $90 a night). Stay with friends. Use public transport where possible instead of renting a car. You’ll need to put in some work, but there’s no reason to pay outrageous sums for travel/lodging/food/whatever. If you find a great deal on a hotel, you can spend a little more on airfare if you need to, and so on.
And yes, you’ll be dipping into your savings a bit. But you know, it’s for something you enjoy (in theory anyway. If you don’t enjoy it, you may way to reconsider how you use your time off.), and in that regard, isn’t really any different from thousands of other luxuries. Set aside for them.
I’m a poor grad student, so my situation is not quite like yours, but I do manage to travel despite not being in a great place financially. I get around it by being a cheapskate traveler, which works great but requires some flexibility (I’ve avoided kids and mortgages for the moment, thank god!) Of course my biggest plan is I travel in cheap places- I’ve decided to spend most of my upcoming vacation in Zambia rather than pricey South Africa, for example. You can travel reasonably well in China and India for less then ten bucks a night, and if you can scrounge up fifty bucks a night you can live like a king. I doubt I’ll ever get to Europe. But I have fun!
Right now, http://www.kayak.com is the place to go. It takes me a long time to buy tickets, because I look at every possible departure-return combination and will also gladly take cheap public transit out to whatever airport is cheapest to fly in and out of within a day’s travel. For example, I live in DC but my next big flight goes out of NYC. No problem- I’ll take book and a cheap bus up there if it will save me a hundred bucks. Kayak makes it easy to search nearby dates and other airports. To give an example, I just bought a ticket to Cape Town. Flying on my preferred dates out of my closest airport would have been over $2,000. But by messing around, I found tickets for $700. I’m seeing tickets to Nairobi in May for $800 right now, which is pretty awesome.
I’m seeing tickets on Kayak right now from $200. BWI is the only cheap way to go in DC, but there is easy ground transport into the city- a bus goes straight from the terminal to the metro (it does take a while.)
There are a number of airline special sites. If you are willing to be flexible about dates, you can find some awesome deal. My mom is a master of finding stuff like RT to London for $200. You just have to be at the right place at the right time and have flexibility about the exact dates.
To save money on the road- it’s all old backpacker tricks. I spend a lot of time sleeping in airports, browsing the cheap rooms on Hostels.com, taking local ground transport and eating street food and making picnics from exotic (and cheap) stuff at grocery stores. This doesn’t mean I don’t have fun. Most hostels have perfectly nice private rooms much cheaper than a chain- the DC Hostelling International (usually a classy operation) has doubles for $55, and there are cheaper private room if you don’t mind getting funky. I splurge on a few nice, truly memorable meals. But if the goal is “food in the stomach” I’ll go to the hotdog stand just outside rather than the museum cafeteria. I also tend towards low-cost attractions- I’m just as happy seeing the Kathmandu valley on a bumpy local bus rather than arranging an expensive guided trek.
Anyway, I live travel a bit closer to the ground than most are comfortable with, but that’s gotten me to 20+ countries. But even if you are not quite as flexible, there are still a lot of cases where you can get the same thing for a cheaper price.
To be clear, the OP named three tiers used by Southwest, then asked what the last one means. I was explaining what the last one means. That was not supposed to be a definition for all three of the tiers. Just the last one. And just for Southwest.
And the information is available on the SW website. Which is where I got it.
You’ve gotten some good advice on reducing airfare costs, but this is important too. It’s not paying $1000 for 2-4 hours of your vacation but for having your vacation in the location of your choice.
You’ve got to mentally add all your costs together and divide them by day or you’ll never justify the flights. Flying is a necessary evil for getting to far away places, only rarely is it an enjoyable part of the vacation so you’re not paying for that 2-4 hours but for the destination.