I found a really cheap flight to Poland - £38 return (budget airlines, yay!) and since I've never been there before, I thought, why not? As it is December, it is quite likely that I will see snow (temperatures will hover around freezing in mid December there) and it is a large capital city - there will be plenty to see and do in Warsaw over a long weekend. Given the flights are so cheap, I am tempted to book a nice hotel and treat myself to some luxury in Warsaw. However it is not solely a question of money, booking hotels have turned into such a routine these days.
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| Warsaw, Poland - I'll be there in mid-December! |
Step 1: Go to a hotel booking website, enter your dates, the city and narrow down your search according to neighbourhoods within the city, price range, number of stars, facilities, room type etc.
Step 2: With the list generated, eliminate those which do not have nice photos or match what you're looking for.
Step 3: With those that you do like the look of, go to booking.com and tripadvisor.com and look for peer reveals.
Step 4: If the hotel has too many bad reviews, go on to the next hotel on the list you like. Repeat this process until you exhaust the list, then go back to step 1 with another website. Groan.
Gone were the days when I could just say, "ooh those photos are nice, let's book it." No, these days it is all about peer reviews - mind you, it's a brilliant idea as I do trust peer reviews, but it's making this task a lot more complicated than it should be. I still have no idea where I will be staying at as it's a big capital city with so many options. I will be looking forward to learning some Polish for this trip - as I already speak some Russian, Czech and Serbo-Croat, I am hoping to understand a lot more Polish than I can speak since it is a Slavic language after all. But hey, it is nice to have a long weekend like that to look forward to in December now, why? Because I'm worth it - sometimes, we just have to be nice to ourselves if no one else will. Poland, here I come!
Have a great trip! You deserve it. £38 is very cheap. Flights are expensive even within Canada.
ReplyDeleteHahahaha, it beat my record for cheapest return flight ever booked online in Europe - the last one was £40 for a return flight to Lisbon. Mind you, I did get hold of some very cheap internal flights in Indonesia, my Yogyakarta to Bali flight was like £20 one way as well, as was my SIN - Yogyakarta flight. I have friends who did manage to get deals for even less, it's incredible when you consider just how much these flights are losing the airlines because surely the bulk of that £38 is going on airport tax already and they must be making practically nothing from me on these flights.
DeleteDi, talking about expensive flights within Canada, it is definitely more expensive to fly within Canada when you compare domestic flights with flights across the US-Canada border. The latter does not even cost that much more comparatively!
DeleteKevin, last January, I wanted to fly from Vancouver to Edmonton (40 minute flight? 60 minutes top), for a funeral. The cost was over CAD$500.00! Outrageous. We do not have enough competition.
DeleteI am curious. All businesses will want to make money. Why is the airline company doing that?
ReplyDeleteThat's a good question. Some airlines do what we call a "loss-leader deal" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loss_leader This is more common in places like supermarkets, where if you know that you can get super cheap (below cost) ham, you're more likely to get the rest of your weekly grocery shopping there and the small lost they make on the ham they sell you is compensated by the profit they make on everything else you bought whilst you're in the store.
DeleteAs for budget airlines, sure they make a loss on the flight (because of the hefty airport taxes) but they catch you out on other things, such as check in luggage (are you willing to fly with hand luggage only?) and they try to sell you other stuff for your trip like car rental, hotel, travel insurance, priority boarding, transfers to and from the airport, pay extra to select your seat etc. Presumably some people do spend money with them on stuff like that - others don't. I unchecked all of the boxes that tried to sell me all the extra crap and just paid £38 flat for a return flight to Warsaw - that's £19 one day. I just found out that it costs about the same to get to Birmingham from London by train, crikey.
Whooops typo: "that's £19 one WAY".
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