Flight planning was a doozy, so this is a two parter, you can catch up on our overall strategy of preferring one-way flights in part one.
Getting started
We built our flights in stages. Timing mattered for our trip. Our Italian family wasn’t out of school until mid-July. That set the beginning of the European part of our trip.
We knew we wanted to either start or end our trip in Pennsylvania. In this case preferences lined up with flight pricing. Starting in in PA lets us better manage jet lag, for both the kids and the grownups. It also means we can come straight home when our trip is over. We may be less fun to be around after three weeks of travel.
We booked our flight from Seattle to PA first. We also booked the flight to Rome around the same time. We did have to decrease our time in PA by a day to make the schedule work, but it saved us $100 a ticket.
We used Skyscanner’s feature that let you look for prices across an entire month. This helped us figure out the best days to fly, which often turned out to be Tuesdays. Since we don’t have any specific dates we have to be places, this let us align our travel days to help the budget.
We also used Skyscanner’s feature where you can set a broad origin or destination. This helped us choose airports, especially from the East Coast of the United States. I’d just say we were flying from the United States to Rome. Skyscanner would show costs for a dozen airports and it would be easyto quickly see which was cheapest.
And as luck(?) would have it, the cheapest was Newark. Thankfully they have re-opened a runway and things look to be doing better. Stay tuned to this space to see how it goes.
But how do we get there from Pennsylvania? My parents are awesome and are dropping us off. That door-to-door service gave us the flexibility we needed to save some money.
In europe
From Rome, we got into intermodal planning, which I’ll talk about more in another post. But we knew it was way cheaper to rent a car in Naples. That meant it would be easiest to fly out of Naples, and fortunately, there’s a Ryanair flight to Brussels.
From there, we kept building our flights from one European destination to the next, looking for the best days to get the best deals. We are flying four different airlines in total. Every single flight in Europe is non-stop, except for our very last one home.
Getting home
The flight from Norway back to the U.S. was the hardest to book. Flight prices jumped almost 50 percent from our original estimates. We were looking at some two-stop, three-passport-control options to meet our budget.
It got bad ya’ll.
Our preference was to fly Icelandair. It broke the trip into two smaller flights. Normally we avoid layovers like the plague they are, but Janika has transferred in Reykjavík before, and they know what they’re doing. Even with a stop, it was the fastest way home.
But to make the price work, we had to use a third-party booking site. And the way they ticketed us, we may have to claim our luggage and go back through security in Reykjavík. I’m hoping I can talk Icelandair into combining our itineraries. I’ll add a comment to let you know how it goes.
Bags
We wanted zero checked bags for this trip. We are bringing a booster seat for Tom, so we can’t avoid checking items altogether, but we didn’t want to depend on checked bags for our essentials.
There are lots of reasons for that that I’ll get into when we talk about gear, but one major reason was for flight flexibility.
We were even able to take the cheapest fare class on our flight to Rome, which doesn’t include checked bags. That saved us more than $100 a ticket, and that savings meant we were able to pick more desirable, and expensive, seats, and still save money overall.
We didn’t look at amenities on any of the flights within Europe. We’re flying budget carriers, and the flights are short. We often pack snacks anyway since Janika is gluten- and dairy-free. The long flights have meals, and Icelandair even has specific kids’ meals, which is a nice bonus.
We will be equipped with two tablets and downloaded favorites in case the in-flight entertainment options don’t work for the kids. Given our experience, we know what our boys can handle on a six hour flight. We’ve just never done an overnight flight, so we’ll have to see how that goes.
Because we are staying mostly with family, flights are by far the most expensive part of our trip. Buying four tickets means that saving even $25 per ticket adds up. We pinched pennies where we needed to and didn’t compromise on what we anticipate will be our most difficult flights.
Tom and Jerry are not our boys real names. For some reason Tom got to watch Tom & Jerry in first grade, and he loves it. And for those that know me and are wondering, “Who’s Janika” I’m changing all the names.