Be Ready When Deals Come Up For Your Top 3 Destinations or I’m Going to Easter Island!
It just really makes your morning and eliminates the need for coffee. Perhaps the need for any caffeine for the entire week. I’m positively trembling with excitement and I haven’t even made it out of bed yet.
That’s because I woke up, checked my email and saw View from the Wing and One Mile at a Time had posted about a $1,000 biz class fare to Easter Island. (Btw, have you signed up for an email subscription to Heels First Travel? If not, get on that!)
Easter Island has long been one of the top 3 places I want to visit. There’s just something about the thought of seeing those giant faces and carvings in person that thrills me. When I was planning a trip several years ago to French Polynesia, I’d tried to work out a way to “stop over” on Easter Island for a day if we went via South America, but that wasn’t really feasible. I’d tried to do it on this more recent trip to Mendoza, but again, that was about as close to Santiago as Los Angeles is to DC.
So this morning, when I saw the deal, I immediately grabbed my laptop and hoped the one morning I’d slept in in weeks hadn’t ruined my chances of going at an affordable price. I pulled up the ITA Matrix software to start finding some dates. The availability was even less then others had been finding, but I played with the number of nights I was willing to stay from 3-5 to 1-2 and eventually found something.
Then I started trying to figure out how to book it.
I plugged the dates into Expedia and got $3500. I plugged them into LAN.com and got $1900. I pulled up Orbitz and finally got $1,042 for a 2 night stay. WOOOOHOO! Now just waiting for ticket numbers to be issued and hoping it’s a really good fare and not a mistake deal so there won’t be any risk of it not being honored.
So for infrequent travelers here’s the moral of this post — At any given moment, know the 3-5Â places in the world you most want to go. Why?
- When a mistake or great deal comes up, you don’t even have to think about whether you should, you just need to start finding dates. New Zealand was my #1 destination, then a couple of years ago a United Business Class fare had been erroneously entered as $1300 instead of $13,000. I’d just come home at 2AM the night before from another mistake deal to St. Croix, but when I woke up at 7AM and saw it, I booked it before it disappeared later that morning.
- You’ll know what going is worth to you. I had not planned to spend $1,000 dollars this morning, but I know I value going more than alot of other things, and that going another time would cost significantly more, so it just becomes a matter of tradeoffs after the flight is booked and not trying to figure that all out in real-time.
- You’ll know the minimum/maximum time you’d want to  stay. I was glad I’d done research on Easter Island, because I already knew that one full day is all I would need to see everything I wanted to and take in the ambiance and that probably more than two days would leave me “bored” (a relative term).
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Heels First is the travels and tribulations of two twenty-something frequent fliers jumping into the world of travel. Join Keri and Jeanne as they tackle mileage runs, elite status, and of course–the perfect travel accessories.
Nice! I wish i’d been more on top of the Easter Island one. At that point though, I had already booked a trip to GYE (which I’ll add a ticket to GPS) and also a weekend trip to GIG…so I was kinda booked out for the moment!