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Ticketing is hard

In about a month, we need to fly one-way from Pittsburgh to Zürich. This means booking tickets. There are two complicating factors:

  1. While we're about 95% sure that we'll be leaving in a month, there are still a few things that could go wrong. Refundable tickets are necessary.
  2. I'm fat. I don't fit well into the newer "cattle class" economy seats. We were looking at booking 3 seats for the 2 of us or considering business/first class to get the wider seats there.
Both of these things raise the price of a ticket, and more importantly, they make it nearly impossible to compare prices using Google Flights, Hipmunk, Orbitz, Kayak, etc. However, those services are still a good starting point to figure out what's out there.

I started with the ticketing services to get a list of airlines that flew that route. Then, I went to each airline's website and looked for the same route on the same days. To my dismay, one-way flights are barely less expensive than round-trip. I've been sorely tempted to book a round-trip ticket with the return date 6 months into the future.

As I was looking at flights, I started to group them into three buckets:
  1. A standard one-way economy fare using a major international carrier was $2800 per person. This was true for Delta, Swissair, United, and a few others.
  2. American and British Airways offered flights for about $1600/person, but these flights required two approximately 1 hour layovers in JFK (New York) and LHR (London Heathrow). Both of these airports are large and difficult to navigate quickly.  The chance of missing one of these transfers seemed unacceptably high.
  3. Some of the smaller national carriers (Icelandair, Aer Lingus, LOT, etc.) offer flights for less than $1000/person IF you're willing to accept multiple long layovers and/or are willing to fly significantly out of your way. 
Given the massive price difference, the last group had a lot of appeal. After some digging, I found Icelandair. They don't fly to every city every day. In particular, they only arrive in Zürich on Tuesday and Friday. A minor inconvenience, but not insurmountable. They had two other features going for them: an "economy plus" service with wider seats that was not much more than economy, and an "extend your Reykjavíc layover by up to a week for free" feature. 

As it happens, we knew that mid-week travel was significantly less expensive, but we had already negotiated with our landlord to hand in our keys on a Saturday. So, we were expecting to stay in a hotel for a few days anyway. Staying in a hotel in Reykjavíc instead would not represent a significant change in plans.

So, that's the current plan: leave Pittsburgh on Saturday, arrive at Reykjavíc on Sunday, have a mini-vacation in Reykjavíc, leave on Tuesday, land in Zürich on Tuesday.

Unfortunately, all of this depends on the timely arrival of our visas. There is a chance that we'll be cancelling all of these reservations and starting over from scratch if they don't arrive in time. I'm hoping that the infamous Swiss punctuality carries through to their issuance of foreign visas.

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