TheFlyingDoctor

Of course, the planner in me could not leave things completely to chance, so I did pin down some parameters to tilt the odds of a successful getaway in our favour. As I work on the systems that forecast demand levels, I'm about as well placed as anyone to estimate which flights are likely to leave with at least a few seats.

The potential need for a visa, plus higher fares and greater time requirements, immediately ruled out anything longhaul. For balance, we then dropped the domestic network to make sure we got a good distance from home. Similarly discarded were the nearby French and Dutch airports, which are regular destinations for Luke and I respectively: if we found ourselves with too many options, the preference would be for cities - or countries! - neither of us had visited before. Finally, I excluded anything pre-7am as being unreasonably early.

Those rules in place, I spent a couple of lunchbreaks pulling together a dashboard of possibilites, identifying aiports with paired Sunday morning departures and Monday evening returns, and rating the chances of getting on both. Although the exact forecasts naturally wandered around, the set of viable destinations was fairly stable, and by the Friday night we still had over twenty options:



On Saturday I switched to live seat data to verify my predictions were sensible, pulled in weather forecasts, and skimmed trip advisor for each unfamiliar city. Luke arrived that evening, and we set about whittling down the longlist:

• A third of the options were German: Frankfurt, Hamburg, Dusseldorf, Stuttgart, Hanover, Munich, Berlin. Sensible choices for the airline, as business types position themselves for the week, but less exciting as holiday destinations (except Berlin, but that had alarmingly few seats available in both directions), so we agreed to thin these out.
• Despite Milan having two airports, the flight times meant we would have to commit to one or the other for a single return flight - and both looked almost full. Plus I'll also be passing through for my honeymoon later this year.
• Gibraltar presented no difficulties with regards to the flight - but from my previous visit, I expected we'd have great difficulty finding accommodation at such short notice.
• Billund had some appeal due to its obscurity - but its main attraction is Legoland, which isn't open this early in the year. Trip Advisor couldn't find much else to recommend besides an assortment of churches, and the weather forecast looked a bit grim.
• Luke had been to Oslo a few weeks back, so that also got cut to increase the novelty factor.
• We'd have very little chance of getting seats to Budapest.
• Bucharest I just wasn't sure about, for some reason!

Due to the shape of the schedule, I had already planned to split the flights into two waves of pre- and post-8am options. This meant we could roll for the first wave, list for whatever came up, and then still have the second wave in reserve if we didn't get seats. Whilst we were pondering our 'maybes' from the above, I realised that the ten destinations we were most interested in fit neatly with this plan, with six flights for each wave. So that saved any further deliberation, and we had our shortlist!

Wave 1

• CPH Copenhagen, Denmark
• LCA Larnaca, Cyprus
• MAD Madrid, Spain
• ARN Stockholm, Sweden
• WAW Warsaw, Poland
• NCE Nice, France

Wave 2

• STR Stuttgart, Germany
• BLQ Bologna, Italy
• LUX Luxembourg
• BIO Bilbao, Spain
• MAD Madrid, Spain
• NCE Nice, France

Those established, the last challenge for the evening was packing. I collected up every potentially relevant currency I had to hand (Euros, Kroner, and Kronor), selected a single lens for the camera, threw together an assortment of snacks, and placed my faith in layered clothing and the holy trinity of passport, smartphone and credit card to cover anything else. With the first possible flight being at 07:05, it would be an early start - so, thus prepared, the smart plan was to get an early night.