Roulette Table: Going cheap
By Guy Rundle
FOR decades, the budget traveller in Europe accepted that the necessary but painful core of the experience was covering the distance between the glittering capitals either wedged in the seat of a bus designed for tiny people, crawling through the industrial district of some hell-hole at 3am, or sharing a Kombi with a Dutch hippie named Wim with a theory about Frank Zappa and the moon landings.
But that's all changed in the past 10 years. The cheap-flight revolution began in the late 1990s and now the continent is crisscrossed with every conceivable route, from the big capitals to disused military airports put back into service. With proper planning you can save hundreds of dollars on a holiday, but it takes a bit of work and lateral thinking.
1. Set aside a few hours for research: There are about a dozen notable cheap airlines and a range of more obscure ones, and the best way to get a good deal (if you are a little flexible about destination and date) is to compare as many as possible and try a few route combinations with different airlines. This is best done manually, website by website. There are several websites that purport to find the cheapest available flights but they're rarely completely up to date (prices can change within a day), and they often don't include the smaller airlines.
The largest of the cheap airlines is Irish carrier Ryanair, with a network centred on London, Dublin, Barcelona and Berlin. It is aggressively trying to cement its leading position, building customer loyalty by offering free flights – that is, for one €cent, plus about €10 ($17) in taxes.
Second largest is Easyjet, the company that really kick-started the low-cost flight revolution, but it certainly isn't the cheapest player on the market. Other carriers have their specialties – Skyeurope, for example, is centred on Bratislava, the otherwise dispensable capital of Slovakia, and great for southeastern Europe. Wizzair specialises in Poland and surrounds. BMI Baby flies from regional British cities to Europe and has no flights out of London except for a few British Airways services.
2. Be thorough: There are many valid reasons why a really cheap flight could be lurking amid a range of more expensive ones. A carrier may be offering a destination at, say, €60 including taxes for 12 or 13 days and, right in the middle, there's one for €5. Why? Who knows? Maybe there was a one-way charter booked. Maybe it's a plane that has to be rerouted to get the schedule back in kilter. Keep various websites open in multiple windows, and jump from site to site. It's worthwhile keeping notes as you go to avoid getting lost in a variety of options.
Two carriers that save research time by having an automatic lowest-fare search function are Jet2 and Thomsonfly. Unfortunately, most of their flights leave from Leeds or Sheffield, respectively. The others make you trawl, presumably in the hope you'll tire and book a mid-price fare.
3. Be flexible with dates and cities: The cheapest flights are at least a couple of weeks out and usually, but not always, in the early morning. Be flexible about destinations, too: many such flights are cheap because they are going to underused airports, and it's worth looking at the cities close to where you want to go and considering nearby alternatives.
If you can find a cheap flight from London to Madrid, for example, well, congratulations, you don't need to read any further, but otherwise you might try flying into Santander (in the north of Spain) or Valladolid. Never heard of either? No matter: they are a two-hour or three-hour train ride or drive from Madrid, and flights there from Britain should be at rock-bottom prices.
The alternative gateway strategy is particularly useful in countries with multiple destinations and cheap local transport, such as Portugal and Poland.
You can even fly into one country to get to another – for instance, the best way into Andalusia in Spain might be to take a flight to the Portuguese city of Faro, where a bus ticket or car rental to Seville will be much cheaper than flying direct.
But beware the idiosyncrasies of local transport networks. It's easy to be too clever by half and arrive in Szczecin just after the departure of the twice-weekly train to Warsaw.
4. Make careful note of where the airports actually are: Many airports are only nominally in the city listed as their destination. Flying to Grenoble gets you to Lyons and a shuttle bus. The classic is Frankfurt, as what you're actually flying into is an airport called Frankfurt (Hahn), a couple of hundred kilometres from the city, with a half-dozen cities closer to it than the one after which it is named. Factoring in the cost of getting to the airport is crucial: it may well be more expensive than the actual flight.
5. Be careful booking multiple-leg journeys: The low-cost airlines are point-to-point, which means that even if you're connecting via the same airline, it won't automatically rebook a flight you missed because an earlier one was late. This is particularly important in winter when fog in Europe's north can delay takeoff by hours. Most airlines will rebook at a cost – as much as pound £40 ($100) – that could be more than the actual ticket.
Ideally, aim to arrive in the early morning and leave late afternoon from the same airport (landing in Stansted and taking off from Gatwick is to be avoided at all costs), thus saving the cost of a hotel.
6. Book return flights well ahead: It's easy to grab a cheap outward flight, forget to book a return and suddenly realise the only flights available have skyrocketed to full commercial prices. One solution, if your return date isn't all that definite, is to book multiple return flights. It may seem crazy but it's cheaper to book flights costing €15 out on, say, three consecutive Tuesday mornings six weeks ahead, rather than waiting until two days before you go and then paying €150. (Of course, you won't be refunded for unused seats.)
Once you get over the weirdness of booking flights as if you were betting on a roulette table, you'll see it makes sense.
7. Be lateral: It might be cheaper and quicker to fly in a V-shape than to take a train between two destinations. It may well be easier to get from Esbjerg in Denmark to Gothenburg in Sweden – and who among us hasn't needed to – by flying into and out of Geneva (on different carriers) than it would be to take the two trains necessary to get there.
8. Be open-minded: One of the best things about the cheap-flight era is that it has opened up cities we might otherwise never have considered. Be willing to take pot luck and go where the cheap fares lead you. Who knew that the Pyrenees city of Pau would be such a mysterious border town? Or how about Lubeck in Germany, the city that invented marzipan and seems to run on it still? But don't feel too much like a carefree jetsetter: Ryanair has introduced a policy of charging extra for non-cabin luggage and other carriers are likely to follow.
Copyright 2006 News Limited. All times AEST (GMT + 10).
FOR decades, the budget traveller in Europe accepted that the necessary but painful core of the experience was covering the distance between the glittering capitals either wedged in the seat of a bus designed for tiny people, crawling through the industrial district of some hell-hole at 3am, or sharing a Kombi with a Dutch hippie named Wim with a theory about Frank Zappa and the moon landings.
But that's all changed in the past 10 years. The cheap-flight revolution began in the late 1990s and now the continent is crisscrossed with every conceivable route, from the big capitals to disused military airports put back into service. With proper planning you can save hundreds of dollars on a holiday, but it takes a bit of work and lateral thinking.
1. Set aside a few hours for research: There are about a dozen notable cheap airlines and a range of more obscure ones, and the best way to get a good deal (if you are a little flexible about destination and date) is to compare as many as possible and try a few route combinations with different airlines. This is best done manually, website by website. There are several websites that purport to find the cheapest available flights but they're rarely completely up to date (prices can change within a day), and they often don't include the smaller airlines.
The largest of the cheap airlines is Irish carrier Ryanair, with a network centred on London, Dublin, Barcelona and Berlin. It is aggressively trying to cement its leading position, building customer loyalty by offering free flights – that is, for one €cent, plus about €10 ($17) in taxes.
Second largest is Easyjet, the company that really kick-started the low-cost flight revolution, but it certainly isn't the cheapest player on the market. Other carriers have their specialties – Skyeurope, for example, is centred on Bratislava, the otherwise dispensable capital of Slovakia, and great for southeastern Europe. Wizzair specialises in Poland and surrounds. BMI Baby flies from regional British cities to Europe and has no flights out of London except for a few British Airways services.
2. Be thorough: There are many valid reasons why a really cheap flight could be lurking amid a range of more expensive ones. A carrier may be offering a destination at, say, €60 including taxes for 12 or 13 days and, right in the middle, there's one for €5. Why? Who knows? Maybe there was a one-way charter booked. Maybe it's a plane that has to be rerouted to get the schedule back in kilter. Keep various websites open in multiple windows, and jump from site to site. It's worthwhile keeping notes as you go to avoid getting lost in a variety of options.
Two carriers that save research time by having an automatic lowest-fare search function are Jet2 and Thomsonfly. Unfortunately, most of their flights leave from Leeds or Sheffield, respectively. The others make you trawl, presumably in the hope you'll tire and book a mid-price fare.
3. Be flexible with dates and cities: The cheapest flights are at least a couple of weeks out and usually, but not always, in the early morning. Be flexible about destinations, too: many such flights are cheap because they are going to underused airports, and it's worth looking at the cities close to where you want to go and considering nearby alternatives.
If you can find a cheap flight from London to Madrid, for example, well, congratulations, you don't need to read any further, but otherwise you might try flying into Santander (in the north of Spain) or Valladolid. Never heard of either? No matter: they are a two-hour or three-hour train ride or drive from Madrid, and flights there from Britain should be at rock-bottom prices.
The alternative gateway strategy is particularly useful in countries with multiple destinations and cheap local transport, such as Portugal and Poland.
You can even fly into one country to get to another – for instance, the best way into Andalusia in Spain might be to take a flight to the Portuguese city of Faro, where a bus ticket or car rental to Seville will be much cheaper than flying direct.
But beware the idiosyncrasies of local transport networks. It's easy to be too clever by half and arrive in Szczecin just after the departure of the twice-weekly train to Warsaw.
4. Make careful note of where the airports actually are: Many airports are only nominally in the city listed as their destination. Flying to Grenoble gets you to Lyons and a shuttle bus. The classic is Frankfurt, as what you're actually flying into is an airport called Frankfurt (Hahn), a couple of hundred kilometres from the city, with a half-dozen cities closer to it than the one after which it is named. Factoring in the cost of getting to the airport is crucial: it may well be more expensive than the actual flight.
5. Be careful booking multiple-leg journeys: The low-cost airlines are point-to-point, which means that even if you're connecting via the same airline, it won't automatically rebook a flight you missed because an earlier one was late. This is particularly important in winter when fog in Europe's north can delay takeoff by hours. Most airlines will rebook at a cost – as much as pound £40 ($100) – that could be more than the actual ticket.
Ideally, aim to arrive in the early morning and leave late afternoon from the same airport (landing in Stansted and taking off from Gatwick is to be avoided at all costs), thus saving the cost of a hotel.
6. Book return flights well ahead: It's easy to grab a cheap outward flight, forget to book a return and suddenly realise the only flights available have skyrocketed to full commercial prices. One solution, if your return date isn't all that definite, is to book multiple return flights. It may seem crazy but it's cheaper to book flights costing €15 out on, say, three consecutive Tuesday mornings six weeks ahead, rather than waiting until two days before you go and then paying €150. (Of course, you won't be refunded for unused seats.)
Once you get over the weirdness of booking flights as if you were betting on a roulette table, you'll see it makes sense.
7. Be lateral: It might be cheaper and quicker to fly in a V-shape than to take a train between two destinations. It may well be easier to get from Esbjerg in Denmark to Gothenburg in Sweden – and who among us hasn't needed to – by flying into and out of Geneva (on different carriers) than it would be to take the two trains necessary to get there.
8. Be open-minded: One of the best things about the cheap-flight era is that it has opened up cities we might otherwise never have considered. Be willing to take pot luck and go where the cheap fares lead you. Who knew that the Pyrenees city of Pau would be such a mysterious border town? Or how about Lubeck in Germany, the city that invented marzipan and seems to run on it still? But don't feel too much like a carefree jetsetter: Ryanair has introduced a policy of charging extra for non-cabin luggage and other carriers are likely to follow.
Copyright 2006 News Limited. All times AEST (GMT + 10).
