Booking plane tickets in Europe

When trying to take advantage of the cheap plane tickets in Europe, there are many mistakes that I made that should really not be repeated.

On Tuesday October 5th, my friend Kas asked me if I wanted to go to Italy this weekend, and I figure that it would be a great idea, since the upcoming weekend is a long weekend. I sent a couple requests to some couch surfers, and started looking up plane tickets… 400 Euros. Not only booking on a weekend, but booking on a long weekend 3 days before departure. I should have realized the prices would be so.

I investigated other options such as car sharing, train, ferries, and buses. I pretty much covered all the flights departing anywhere from Western Spain and landing in Northern Italy on August 7 and 8, and any return flight flight on August 10-12. I searched a multitude of sites that collect data from flight companies to find you the cheapest flights, all without finding anything less than 250 Euros. There’s quite a few of them, such as Sky Scanner, Vuelos Baratos, Rumbo, and Last Minute. Although they can sometimes reduce your search time, and provide an essential service to frequent flyers, they can also be very tricky…

1. The prices are wrong: I would often have a glimmer of hope when I would find a set of plane tickets for relatively cheap. I would click on it to buy it, the price will be updated to double, sometimes as high as 5 times more expensive than the initially listen price. Here’s why: I investigated other options such as car sharing, train, ferries, and buses. If you have a specific flight in mind, these cheap flight companies can look up the information for you within maybe 5 seconds. However, the website can’t search all the flights of each of its 600 airline companies that’s in the database because it would overload the system. What they do instead is that they keep a list of the cheapest flights found through the site in the last several days. If you plan your trip far in advance, prices are fairly constant, but if you’re buying your tickets at the last minute then prices change a lot (they usually go up).
2. Inconsistent taxes: They charge wonky taxes on plane tickets in Europe. In Canada, you can expect a ticket price, and about a fairly constant 100$ of taxes. However, when you book plane tickets here they can vary from no taxes for a 10 Euro return ticket to another country, to a 100$ tax. I can’t figure out if the taxes depend on the length of your stay, the flight, the airline, the countries it flies over or what.
3. Credit card charges: In Europe, they tend to use credit cards a lot less than in Canada. As a result, they often impose certain restrictions, such as minimum credit card spending of 20 Euros (as opposed to 5 in Canada), or charge a credit card fee. For air travel, I’ve seen charges ranging from anywhere from 4.95 – 15 Euros.
4. Random fees: They will have fees that just randomly pop up at times such as management fees, even sometimes even halfway through your booking process without telling you what or why.

Here’s what I suggest: Some search engines are really good at finding cheap plane tickets, but have weird fees such as management fees, certain “taxes”, credit card charges and so forth. Use the best (or most suited) engine for your needs, and once you fing the ticket you want, compare prices. The prices can be fairly close, but a few extra minutes looking up the prices for the exact same flight on several ticket companies may save you a few dollars. Do not assume that buying plane tickets directly from the airline company will be the cheapest method.