Skip to main content

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.

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Virus By the Numbers

I'm writing this because there's some really insane stuff that's being said by people who should really know better, and I'm sick of discussing it one post or email at a time. So, this is my One Big Post that I'll point people toward rather than bringing it up again and again. In case you haven't noticed, we're in the middle of a pandemic. Just so that we're all using the same terminology:  The virus is Severe acute respiratory syndrome Coronavirus 2 . It's usually abbreviated SARS-CoV-2. It's a brand new kind of Coronavirus, so for a while, before it had this awkward name, people were calling it "novel coronavirus". (For the non-English speakers and D students, "novel" is another word for "new".) The disease that the virus causes is called Coronavirus Disease 2019 , and it's usually abbreviated COVID-19. It's called that because it was discovered in 2019. This came out of nowhere in China in late
Post a Comment
Read more

The Chromecast conceptual model

Google makes a device called Chromecast . It's a relatively inexpensive way to turn any TV into a "Smart" TV capable of playing movies or music. It's a clever bit of engineering, but I've run into a few people who have trouble understanding how they work. The key thing to understand is that the Chromecast is the device that's actually receiving and playing the movie (or whatever), and your phone is just the remote. Here's how the process works at a high level: You start watching a video on Youtube 30 seconds in, you decide that you'd like to watch the rest on your TV, so you press the "Cast" button. Your phone stops playing and tells the Chromecast "Get this video directly from Youtube and start playing at the 0:30 mark"  When your phone initially asks the Chromecast to start playing, it also specifies a "default thing" to do when the Chromecast is finished. If the Chromecast is playing a Youtube video, it might
Post a Comment
Read more

Audio upgrade: Schiit Fulla 2

I recently purchased a Schiit Fulla 2 . I was on the fence about it for a long time, but it's held up well, and I'm pretty happy with it. So, here's a small product review. I should probably mention that I'm generally skeptical about "audiophile" anything. I've known too many people who spend way too much money on voodoo like "oxygen-free speaker cables". This makes me reluctant to trust reviews or spend money on anything that I can't test for myself.  I've heard good audio. I go to concerts. I know what music is  supposed to  sound like, and it wasn't what I was getting from any of my computers, even with decent headphones, lossless audio codecs, etc. On the other hand, we have some  Sonos speakers , and with those speakers and a good audio source, music can sound really good. Since I wasn't getting that level of quality at the computer, it meant that there was something between the computer and my ears that was part of
Post a Comment
Read more