glennnn

Thanks for the tips, especially the notes about the g fares. My understanding, from the thread, was that these fares appeared with a few days notice. I'll take a look on BA.com for the same day flights as it doesn't seem to be restricted to short notice fares.

As for destinations ideally ABZ, but there is nothing cheap going in the next couple of months. I figured a couple of day trips would be a more exciting way of getting 20TP.

florens

You might be able to get ABZ in CE for 80TPs for about £229 (albeit with a Saturday night stay requirement) which might be a better value than buying expensive Y tickets.

glennnn

I'm not that keen ABZ can wait, but thank you.

squawk

Interesting thread - thanks for the guide on the previous page, c-w-s.

Are there any ways to narrow down the options for those of us based outside London? Obviously day trips eg NCL-LHR-XYZ and back are harder, but an overnight at LHR is feasible - as, I’m guessing, are nesting two overlapping trips?

One of my never-ending frustrations with the BA “Low Fare Finder” (and the cheap holiday finder) is that it assumes everyone is travelling from London. No way of specifying anywhere else as the origin - so you have a two-step shuffle of firstly identifying the cheap destinations (and you can’t sort by price on the LFF), then querying using BA.com or Matrix/Google with NCL or wherever as your origin.

bisonrav

The google flights map trick works for any starting airport and includes multiple hops - I was using it yesterday to look at days out in Sarawak where I'm staying in November (my wife is Malaysian) including some very nice little Twin Otter flights to the unfashionable side of the back of beyond with Maswings via odd airports. You just click on airports and dates until you find something that suits.


Incidentally it does also show up CWS's fares, as far as I can tell, I'm quite tempted by a day trip to Bordeaux, but the Saturday timings suck. Fridays are better it seems. Being 20 minutes down the train line from Gatwick creates a lot of temptation on these fares

corporate-wage-slave

My base is between NCL and EDI, so I've had to live with this issue for a long time. G fares are available from NCL, for £88 return for the awayday to LHR. The problem are the sports' supporters who snaffle them up as soon as fixtures become known. You can do some connections, I don't think you can combine two G fares but you can combine (e.g.) O and then G, and O add-on for NCL can be quite cheap. So for example on 3 February one could do lunch in Dublin for £138 as NCL-LHR-DUB return. You'd have only about 2 hours in Dublin city centre though, since the early and late NCL services aren't either, really.

EDI has more options (and more through fares).

I'm afraid this is where experience really helps, because the G fares are Private Fares they won't necessarily come up on ITA Matrix or Google Flights, it gives a fare of £160 O+O since it can't see O+G. Skyscanner.net does see this information, albeit by scraping fare information off online travel bookers who have access to Private Fares, so you could use them and reverse engineer back to BA.com

There is no harm in putting a thread up saying "I want to do a NCL away day on this date, best I've come up with is DUB at £138, any better ideas going?"

jwhite9185

Even then, its not overly straight forward. It might come up as lowest fare £44 each way for example, but it'll only let you book a £396 fare outbound... then give you £44 for the return.

Having said that, if you dig deep enough, you can find day trip fares for around £80-£90. I don't remember the last time I spent the whole weekend at home...

Ususal candidates for day returns are NCE (where I'm currently sat), GVA, MAD and NCL.

Sometimes AMS, EDI and GLA pop up for that price too, but they're not as common

snuffi

I've done day trips to VCE, FCO, BOD, MAD, BCN, SVG, BGO, CPH and AMS all for under £100 each. Generally very tiring with such an early start but well worth the effort. The Stavanger trip was particularly memorable for a boat trip up the Lysefjord in superb weather.

squawk

Thanks, as ever, corporate-wage-slave for your detailed reply - given your base, I did wonder if you had a creative solution for finding good fares from this region ^ Working backwards from Skyscanner isn't something I'd have considered, without this kind of background knowledge about what is/isn't possible.

That's a nugget of information worth filing away: ensure one books the fares before the football fixture list is released!

Thank you, jwhite9185 and snuffi. That gives some interesting ideas.

glennnn

Just to close the loop, ABZ is £88 for this Sunday booking into G. Only showing on BA.com.

flatlander

VIE is £102.

If you don't feel like some fine Caledonian weather

More generally, these fares are sometimes available on Saturdays as well as Sundays. They do not allow an overnight stay, unfortunately.

BApilotinsider

Had forgotten all about these. Great day out and some good fares out there for the next few weekends..

florens

BSL is available too exLHR for £97, and the other way round as well for about the same.

Richmond_Surrey

Are these fares gone or just removed from GVA route during ski season? In past, I used to fly to Geneva Motor Show on this day trip ticket or using Avios, but can't find anything this year and checked it some time ago, so not very last minute. Other arilines are expensive for day returns too.

flyuk

Holy thread revival Batman...

I've seen deals for one and two night stays in Europe. In fact, I booked one last weekend for Prague for £90 and one for Luxembourg for £80.