Think Outside the Cylinder

When you’re trying to connect to get from where you live to where you are going, the obvious route isn’t always the best one.

If you are trying to maximize your travel budget, sometimes you need to get creative. I spent a half hour on the phone with a friend the other night, trying to get her family from Florida to Prague around Christmas without her spending her life savings in the process. In the end, we figured out that if they all flew into Munich instead and took a bus or train direct to their final Czech destination, they would save about $200 each, or $800 total. That’s not chump change. If she weren’t carting a bunch of kids and their stuff along, she could have saved even more by just taking the cheapest flight into Europe and then hopping on a budget airline from there.

I’m currently weighing something similar for Mexico the first week of January. If we fly into our destination of Merida, at the moment it’s close to $750, which is nuts. If I fly into Cancun and take a first-class $28 bus over instead, it’s $580. Still nuts, but better. I’m holding out to see where things end up, but the point is you sometimes have to pull out an atlas and look at other options.

When we booked our very first round-the-world trip, we put together flights from a consolidator, someone who was just patching one-way tickets together to make it work. One leg was going to take us from India to Turkey, then we were going to fly from there into Greece. “If you fly into Greece first and then go overland into Turkey,” the agent told us, “it’ll be a good bit cheaper.”

“How much cheaper?” I asked.

“Ummm, looks like about $350 each,” he replied. The overnight bus from Athens to Istanbul took 24 hours, but for a $700 savings? Sold.