Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Cheaper travel’ Category

Much as we sometimes feel that we’re nailed to the spot over here in fact we’re planning several trips in the coming months so are starting to hunt out locations and where we might stay.

More than likely we’ll be looking for a hotel near Barcelona airport as it’s more than likely where we’ll be flying from and the HLG Sant is currently the front runner on that score as we’ll be able to park the car there for a sensible amount of money plus get the kids in free.

But, where to go? Well, first off we might be off to London for a few days at the start of September though ’tis early days for that one and we’re not even sure if we’re going so it’s a little early to get terribly specific about locations for that one.

Also on the cards is Rome but that’ll not be until mid-October at the earliest. Having said that, I quite like the idea of a B&B right beside the Vatican and the price ain’t too bad either considering the location.

It feels like I’ve been commuting between Perpignan and Belfast over the last month or so with two trips already and a third looming.Since we have places to stay in both countries, it means that our timetable is quite flexible so I’ve spent a bit of time on SkyScanner checking out the cheapest prices and coming up with some slightly peculiar routes.

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.

I’m sure that there are lots of opinions on this one, but for me the most useful item of luggage that I have at the moment is something that I received as a Christmas present many years ago: a set of luggage scales.

Having these means that I’m never one of those people standing at the Ryanair checkin desk arguing that there’s no difference to the plane if there’s 9kg in carryon and 16kg in checked luggage or 10kg in carryon and 15kg in checked because I have already moved that 1kg from checked to carryon before I get to the desk. In fact with these scales we were able to manage 85kg and no excess fees on a recent trip (2 adults, 2 children can carry up to 100kg on Ryanair, not counting the pram). Without them, we’d have been sure to be arguing that we should be able to share the checked luggage allowance.

You might think that you will be able to check the weight using one of the unused checkin desks. However, in newer desks the scales are switched off when they aren’t being used and, of course, the staff won’t let you weigh luggage in advance at a desk with no queue as that will clearly reduce the income received through excess weight charges.

It’s definitely worth purchasing a set if you’ve not got them already as they’ll almost certainly save their cost on your first trip. Now, all you have to do is to hunt them out as I’ve not seen them for sale for quite a while.

Of course, their disappearance coinciding with the arrival of more aggressive excess charging is just a co-incidence. Isn’t it?