dhammer53

Every so often, a low fare, or error fare comes along; and we jump on it.

Earlier in the week, UA and AA were duking it out on several domestic routes; one of which was LGA/LAX for $149 R/T (return). Now I've been to LA over 110 times for business since 1988. I know LA, and most of it's nooks and crannies.

My wife and I were talking about going to Cancun (CUN) for the first time this fall. Now, all of a sudden the LA fare comes up, and it changes everything. For now, CUN is off the list. We have a week in LA, and all I'm figuring out is what to do/where to go. We've been to Palm Springs (PSP), San Diego (SAN), Santa Barbara (SBA), and up the coast. My thoughts have moved on to where can we fly from the LA area. My wife wants to go back to Seattle for a few days. I prefer Hawaii. ^

FYI, we've been to MXP (2x's) and NRT in the last 8 months, all thanks to these crazy fares.

My question to you, do you overthink these trips?

Since we'll be in LA for 7 days, we literally can fly anywhere. These low fares can make a guy crazy.

dh

TravelerMSY

This is sacrilege to say it here, but you don't actually have to fly to a city just because the fare is cheap.

DavidDTW

Yes, because some deals often conflict with previously booked travel and I can't take advantage of the cheap fares!

guv1976

Wirelessly posted (BlackBerry: BlackBerry8530/5.0.0.1030 Profile/MIDP-2.1 Configuration/CLDC-1.1 VendorID/417)

"My wife wants to go back to Seattle for a few days. I prefer Hawaii."



Dan, both of those destinations are relatively cheap redemptions from LAX with BA Avios, if you can find "SAAver" award seats on AA/AS nonstops.

hscottm

Envious to those of you in the duke it out markets! Nothing great from PIT or anywhere reasonably close (although something from ERI came up recently).

jrl767

I'm guessing the answer is "She does" but who says you have to go to the same place?

nerd

How stupid can you get?

Why would you book a plane flight to LA for a week, when you don't have an interest in being in LA for the 111th time, or really anywhere near LA, but would rather be in Mexico?

At some point you have to step back and wonder why this is somehow worth the $200 you saved on your ticket to somewhere you have no interest in going.

dhammer53

That did cross my mind before I pulled the trigger. I can think of worse places to be than LA. Push comes to shove, there are plenty of places to drive to within 90 - 120 minutes. We'll somehow manage.

lalala

I vote for you to come to Seattle 😀

Emeraldcity

Seattle or Oregon always a couple of great places to visit.
Of course it will depend on when you come. Now is great........October/November may be kind of wet.........

BenA

Honestly, some of my greatest travel delights have come from this style of travel - often unexpectedly.

A $350 fare to HEL resulted in a fantastic excursion to Estonia, which I never would have planned otherwise. Similarly, Seoul is now one of my favorite cities, thanks to a $500 ICN deal.

Granted, I do find that often the same destination goes on sale repeatedly, and visiting over and over can get a bit repetitive. But that's just another opportunity! For example, I love Hong Kong and Singapore, but I end up in both a lot, and I've started taking short hops to neighboring destinations to diversify a bit (Shenzhen, Kuala Lumpur, etc.)...

dhammer53

I should talk to my wife more often.

We drove to the Adirondacks for a long weekend, and had an interesting discussion about this topic. The first thing she said out loud was why didn't I book 2 or 3 of these NY/LA trips.

She said there's plenty to do in the LA basin, and this from someone that's been to LA maybe 10 times.

The next half hour in the car was spent discussing where to go. Mt Baldy, Kings Canyon, back up north to Santa Ynez and the central coast wine country, and on and on. My goodness, when she was finished talking about this, we decided we needed a full month to tour.

dh

RustyC

Yep. I run into this all the time. If you have a lot of flexibility for when you can take your trips you soon learn that the most fertile times for deals (or available seats on deals, or awards at lowest level) tend to be September, October, the first 2 weeks of November and December, the 3 weeks after mid January, and April and May except Easter and Memorial Day. The VERY lowest are near tax day (April 15), Cinco de Mayo and Halloween.

So those blocs often get filled. I've even walked away from Spirit off-peak award tickets (change fee is higher than ticket cost) because of better deals coming along.

This year I had a fairly full schedule booked for the first half when the Eithad deal came along on Christmas day and I jumped on it for trips to AUH, MNL and SEZ. That displaced or shortened some other plans.

OTOH, because DL and UA don't think a mile flown should be an RDM earned, something would have to be a pretty big mistake on those to get me to go. ATL has been a good city for AA lately, with RT deals often popping up to DFW/ORD/PHL/MIA, often sub-$100 RT, and LAX sometimes at sub-$200 RT. Will be going to Chicago on a weekend in September (out early Saturday, back late Sunday) at $89 RT, albeit on an RJ.

GUWonder

Today's OSL-US business class deal didn't mess around with my travel plans. It just reduced the cost of my otherwise due travel expenses.