Foreign Perspectives

We’re just getting organised for a trip to Belfast next week and have been pricing the flights on Skyscanner as that’s a much, much easier way to pick out the cheap flights compared to trying to do it directly on the Ryanair site.

As usual, it’s cheaper and more convenient for us to fly out of Carcassonne and back to Girona. Most people wouldn’t think of doing that as the historic assumption has always been that return flights are cheaper. That was certainly true in the days before discount airlines but although discount airlines will normally let you book a return ticket, in practice their flights are actually priced as one-way.

So, in our case, if you were flying from Dublin to the Pyrenees, the cheapest thing to do is usually to fly from Dublin to Girona and then fly back to Dublin from Carcassonne. The one complication in this scenario if you’re coming here is that international dropoffs of cars can be expensive so you need to price in that aspect of your trip before committing yourself to booking the flights. However, there are other pairs of airports in the same area where flights in one direction are substantially cheaper than those in the other direction so it’s worth spending 20 minutes or so looking at alternatives to simple return flights.

Another aspect of this is that you can often find that the flight times are more convenient to other airports in the same area in one direction but not in the other one. For instance, we find that the flight from Carcassonne to Dublin departs around 1pm so we can get to Belfast easily enough that day. Coming back, the 6pm flight to Girona is also handy for us as we can also do Belfast to Girona in one day vs the 9am departure for Carcassonne which would require a night in a Dublin hotel.

Don’t forget that Ryanair charge 4.50‚€ for each item of checked luggage these days (it’s more if you don’t declare the bags online in advance) and that the limit is now 15kg per person of checked luggage, 10kg per person of carryon (don’t forget to get some luggage scales to take full advantage of this). Possibly more significant is that children 2 years or older get a full luggage allowance and, crazy at it might appear, two adults with two kids can take 100kg of luggage with no overweight charges.