We were thinking of vacation ideas and the idea of going to Disneyland for their first-ever Pride Nite came up. Then the realization that Disneyland Paris was having their Pride event four days later. Hmmm, that’s enough time to fly to Paris, isn’t it?
It is. If you were a Disney fan and had the opportunity to go for one day at Disneyland and three and a half days at Disney Paris as one slightly absurd week long trip, would you? If money’s no object, the roughly $6,000 per person cost is no problem, but I’ve got passwords, not unlimited funds. Almost half of that is airfare. I’ve never flown overseas, so I have no idea if $3,000 for “economy plus” nonstop flights (open-jaw route LAX-CDG-SFO) is a good price or not. Keep in mind this is for something six weeks away.
I probably wouldn’t do that trip. It’s a long flight, and it’ll take some time to recover. That’s a lot of time to invest just to have four days at the destination.
If I’m going to travel that far, I’d want as much time in Europe as I could manage. Not all of it at Disneyland Paris, probably not all my time in Paris, either. See some museums, palaces, battlefields, whatever; maybe spend a couple days in London, Brussels, Amsterdam, or somewhere not too far away.
If you can dump the economy plus and just do economy, I see tickets for <$2000. Overseas economy is not at all like US domestic economy: there’s more leg room, infotainment on every seat, decent meals, free drinks, a USB charger for your phone/tablet, etc. Depending on the airline, you may get a charge for choosing your own seat, but I’ll damned well pay another $80 for an aisle seat in economy, bargain.
Kayak.com is a decent site for multicity tickets if you want to play with ticket ideas.
I wanted to copy this guy in a very limited way? Actually no, but he went to all 12 Disney parks on the planet in 12 days and rode over 200 rides. That can’t be cheap.
I don’t think I’m the right generation to be much of a Disney fan. They hadn’t started their modern trajectory of doing more socially conscious fairy tales, their cartoony stuff was very dated and didn’t stand up well to Hanna-Barbera let alone Looney Tunes, and their theme parks were for little kids — older kids wanted Six Flags or, later, Universal Studios.
I would not do this. The jet lag back and forth is brutal. (As an American living in Europe who occasionally travels back to the States, I am very familiar with this.)
You could logistically make the trip work but you would be very unlikely to enjoy it in a practical sense.
If it were me, I wouldn’t make this my first overseas trip. I definitely wouldn’t do it after a trip to Disney which is exhausting in its own way.
Making this about Disney events - not to mention on fairly short notice - is going to increase your cost and limit your options. Take a little more time to plan, use the money to do other stuff, and make your first international trip about you rather than about squeezing into an established schedule.
Or don’t! Pride is awesome and there are worse reasons to be exhausted.
$3,000 seems awfully steep for airfare from the US to Europe, even for a summer trip from the west coast. Any chance you could play around with your dates, or do you only have a limited amount of time off? A longer trip might actually work out to be cheaper even with the additional costs for lodging, etc., and it would certainly be more enjoyable. Especially if it’s your first trip to Europe, it makes more sense to stay for a while and see something besides a theme park.
Point 1: I’m not sure how true this is. The plain economy seating on my US carrier’s international planes is identical to on our domestic planes. Every seat has the same legroom & width. Some of our planes have screens at every seat, others expect you to bring your own device and connect to the Wi-Fi to stream. But in either case, the entertainment contents are the same. And whether it’s our screen or yours is unrelated to whether it’s long-haul or short-haul. Every seat on every plane has 110V & USB connections. Meals are more & better on long-haul, but drinks in economy cost the same.
If the OP intends to fly on a non-US-based airline there may be some differences between that and standard US airline practice. Which is pretty much as I’ve described.
IMO Economy plus is totally worth it on a US airline.
Point 2: the open-jaw trip is probably more expensive than a straight round trip. You might consider looking at just LAX-CDG-LAX or SFO-CDG-SFO to see how much that might save. Even the full circle SFO-LAX-CDG-SFO might be cheaper if bought as a unit.
Point 3: This is a lot of airtime for a short time there in Paris. A seasoned traveler constitutionally easy with jetlag would not have a problem. Somebody who’s not seasoned or who’s prone to bad jetlag would be hammered the whole time in Paris and would feel like shit for 3 days after getting home. Which might really dis-color their interest in future long-haul travel unnecessarily.
It’s not, really. Paris is a fairly expensive destination. Non-stop flights from Boston a bit less (in the $2200 range). And often Economy Plus is really required, since regular economy often doesn’t allow access to the overhead bin or seat assignments. If you’re flexible on dates you might be able to save a bit of money, especially if you extend the stay in France to around a week. Of course then you’ll spend more on lodging.
I wouldn’t do this for a first trip overseas. The jet lag will be a killer, and you won’t be able to enjoy much while you’re over there. You’ll lose at least a full day, maybe more, to being out of sorts from the travel.
I have extensive experience flying internationally. I’ve taken two trips to SE Asia in the last 5 months, on China Airlines for the first trip, ANA + Cathay for the second, and things were as I describe above. I fly domestic on Southwest and American usually. The difference in seat pitch is slight but noticeable to me, plus the international seats have a bendable headrest so you can sleep easier sitting up; I’ve never seen that on US flights. I’ve also never seen USB plugs on a domestic flight; if you’re lucky there’s a 120v outlet in a box under the middle seat which I’ve never tried to use because you can’t see the damned thing, and “hey, can I reach between your legs middle-seat-person?” is not a conversation I want to have. I’ll take your word for it that some planes have screens on seat backs, but again I’ve never seen it. My last international flight had something like 50 movies available, which is insane considering how tedious it is navigating one of those screens. And there’s definitely not free alcohol drinks or good food on domestic flights.
All that said, maybe domestic travel has improved some of these things and I haven’t noticed because I mostly travel internationally. I think my last non-Southwest flight was SJC to Tucson a couple of years ago and there were definitely no frills. I look forward to my free (alcohol) drinks on the next flight to podunk USA
This varies quite a lot by airline. I have been on flights on international carriers from the US to Europe that did not have particularly good seats or leg room and some that had great seats, at least compared to US standards. Sometimes that would even describe different aircraft from the same carrier.
USB plugs on domestic flights are increasingly common, so I’m not sure where that is coming from, either.
There’s really not a good way to generalize either international or domestic carriers like this.
I defer to your greater knowledge of all things airlines, but I guess I’ve been checking some of the low cost flights lately. I’ve been surprised that some of the International flights don’t include seat assignments.
I’ve only made a handful of trips to Europe from the U.S., but this is definitely a factor. There’s a nine-hour time zone difference between the U.S. West Coast and mainland Europe, which is going to make the first couple of days after each flight pretty brutal, especially for a first-time traveler to Europe.
