As you read this, I am en route to Boston, Massachusetts, for a quick client meeting. My summer of travel has grown yet again – Jacksonville, FL, and Asbury Park, NJ, are right around the corner – but now I have a fall trip to look forward to as well. Come November, we’re heading to New Zealand!
I can hardly believe that as I type it, but like when we booked tickets to Spain, it started with a Scott’s Cheap Flights alert. Just before 5pm on Friday, I got an email with this headline:
I obviously had to open it, but I expected that this would be a deal out of Atlanta or Miami. And while Atlanta topped the list, I was shocked to see Tampa on the list too – at the very same price as everywhere else. Immediately, I fired up Google Flights to see what sort of availability there was. After all, it didn’t do me much good if the only flight that cheap was with three layovers and left tomorrow.
Well friends, I’m not sure if this is a new route added by American or what, but there was plenty of availability in the fall of this year for the same price, and with only one fairly quick layover. Since we’ve never seen tickets to Auckland for that cheap, we booked them Friday night, figuring we could evaluate. After all, we had 24 hours to cancel if we needed to, and at $892 per person, we knew we needed to jump on it.
Probably my #2 secret to traveling on a budget is to book the tickets while the low price is there, then evaluate whether or not you can make it work in your 24-hour window. That way, you haven’t missed out on the deal when you decide you want to go. This is what we did when we evaluated our Tahiti trip.
A quick check on hotel and Airbnb pricing said that we wouldn’t totally blow our saved flight expenses on lodging, so we put together a quick budget. For about $5k to cover two weeks, did it make sense for us to bring our passport-toting toddler to the other side of the world? Hell yes – we knew we could make it work. And after chatting with my husband’s parents about it, they’ll be joining us as we explore Auckland and beyond.
Is a 15-hour flight with a toddler going to be rough? I can only assume. But Tyler and I are fortunate to be able to work from anywhere (as well as have great PTO policies), and at this price, we knew we had to take advantage of it. When else are we going to get the chance to fly the three of us to New Zealand for $2,647? After a couple quiet years on the travel front, I had hoped we’d do more of it in 2022 – and I can say we’ve definitely made that happen.
With that being said, please send me your recommendations for Auckland and beyond! We’ve got some planning to do. 😉
PS – sincere apologies to my manager if this is the first you’re hearing about this trip due to my current travel to Boston; I promise we’ll chat through the details!