It has been a great year for me traveling. Airfares are inexpensive this year and I am trying to make the most of it, because who knows when that will no longer be the case.
I generally used resources like Google Flights, Airfarewatchdog, and Kayak Alerts, but my big discovery this year has been The Flight Deal, which offers just those extra-special fares from a given city instead of searching through generic lists of all fares. To be honest, I am pretty open to where my next destination will be, so if something interesting strikes my eye, I may just opt for that destination:
2016 Journeys:
- Granada, Nicaragua
- San Jose & Manuel Antonio, Costa Rica
- Quito & the Andean Highlands, Ecuador
- Israel
- Palestine
- Jordan
- Lisbon & Porto, Portugal
- Madrid & Toledo, Spain
- Bar Harbor & Acadia National Park, Maine
- Montreal, Canada
- Iceland
- London, England
- Tallinn, Estonia
- St. Petersburg, Russia
- Helsinki, Finland
NICARAGUA – COSTA RICA – ECUADOR
- For Nicaragua, Costa Rica and Ecuador, I spent 45,000 miles with United. A typical USA-Central America award flight is 35,000 miles, so I had to add another 10,000 miles to fly from San Jose, Costa Rica to Quito, Ecuador.
- It was worth it to be honest, because paying in cash for point-to-point flights in Central and South America can be ridiculously expensive – possibly even more than your trip to Central or South America in the first place
- I did have to spend on NatureAir to fly from SJO to Manuel Antonio/Quepos Airport and back, but the $154 roundtrip fare was worth not needing to spend 8 hours in a shuttle service.
ISRAEL-JORDAN-PORTUGAL
- For Israel and Jordan, I decided to experiment with Aeroflot for the first time. For $350 one way, I connected through Moscow to Tel Aviv. I did end that trip meeting up with my S.O. in Lisbon – I booked two separate budget flights on Jetairfly and Ryanair and he kindly spent 30,000 miles to fly me home from Lisbon (The one-way fares on TAP or other airlines worked out to about the same as a round-trip ticket)
- A direct flight from TLV to LIS could run $500-600 and isn’t scheduled for everyday either, so as much as connecting in Brussels airport in the middle of the night was not ideal, it made sense – the only downside was flying two short connecting flights in the middle of the night was not great for a good night’s sleep!
- Madrid, Spain was done through a TAP deal which showed up on The Points Guy for $250 roundtrip! The downside was that we had long layovers in Lisbon, but we did use one to hop back into the city for a quick walk.
- Flying into Acadia National Park ran around $300+ roundtrip on Delta Airlines. On the one hand, it was more expensive than Portland, Maine, but I think I would drive up next time rather than deal with these express carriers.
- Montreal, Canada was done by flying into Burlington, Vermont on United for only $180 roundtrip (far less expensive than flying directly to YUL, which can run $300-400 in the summer).
- Again, the express portions of Delta, United, etc. have a high cancellation and delay rate and I would rather just drive next time.
- To visit Iceland – London – Baltics, I took advantage of an Icelandair flight for approximately $440. This flew me to London with a long 1-day layover in Iceland, then eventually from London back to Iceland where I spent a few days before flying back to EWR.
- I just had to tack on flights from LGW-Tallinn on Easyjet and then from Helsinki to LHR on British Airways, each running me about $100.
- In the grand scheme of things, other Icelandair fares I had been looking at for my trip were $1,100 – $1,200 so some of the annoyances were well worth the cost saving.
- To visit Poland, I used The Flight Deal again and spent approximately $330 to fly from EWR-Warsaw via Vienna on Austrian, and then back from Krakow-EWR via Zurich on Swissair. Both airlines charged me $25-35 to reserve a seat, but again, the overall cost is far less than I would pay to go to Poland some other way, such as LOT.
- Going into Warsaw and out of Krakow just requires a fairly inexpensive rail trip
- To visit Southeast Asia, I spent $800 to book an open jaw on EVA (a great airline that has some amazing fares this year; So does Cathay Pacfic). Going into Denpasar, Bali (DPS) and flying out of Hanoi, Vietnam (HAN).
- The only part that hurts is that a TigerAir flight from DPS-SGN with a layover in SIN was $280.
- My three internal flights in Vietnam were all less than $50, with a reserved seat and bag.
Upcoming Journeys This Year:
- Bali, Indonesia
- Vietnam
Top Picks for 2017:
- Ethiopia
- Uzbekistan
- Croatia
- New Zealand
- Egypt
The Lonely Explorer - A Blog About Traveling Alone Across the Globe 