So the first thing one has to do when planning a trip to someplace like Paris is to get flight and hotel reservations. Even though the trip is at least five months away, this is pretty much an essential thing to do as soon as possible. In some ways this won't be the most expensive part of the trip. Oh no: Buying food, taxi services, and tickets to Disneyland Paris and Louvre Museum, THAT'S where most of your money will be spent! That said, the plane and hotel costs are the first thing to pay for, and they present the biggest hurdle to get over. I looked up what a flight to Paris on JetBlue would cost (seeing that they are one of the cheaper airlines out there) and the round way ticket cost $1,089. I'm not sure if this included tax or not.
Sites like Southwest and Delta had prices up to $2,000, so this was certainly a big savings. Going to "bargain saving" airlines is never recommended. For starters, I don't know if they are safe. Secondly, while the ticket itself might come in around reasonable $500 rates, the amount of taxes that are added on can literally be hundreds of dollars. This basically means there's very little (if any) money you're saving using these flights. And the flights might be unsafe to boot. Seriously folks, stick with the major airlines in this case. Booking hotel rooms can be a tricky thing as well. While a Google search for "paris+cheap hotels" yielded lots of results, most were a few hundred dollars a night or more. Hardly what I would call "cheap."
This is largely because only the major hotels in Paris really advertise on Google, and pay the high amounts of money to make sure their site shows up first in the search engine. The cheaper hotels are usually buried around page five of the search results. Thankfully, sites like Travelocity and Cheap Travel.com have made this experience a little easier to get around. They will sell you package deals on cheap (but reliable) flights and hotels. I typed in my planned departure dates: Nov. 6th - Nov. 13th. The cheapest deal I found was $1,685. This included a two stop, round way trip to Paris and about a weeks’ worth of nights at a Hilton Hotel (gee, THAT'S ironic). For an extra $100 I could get a non-stop flight.
For obvious reasons, this is an extra $100 dollars well spent. With each of these places they give you a list of hotel and airline packages, and there's simply no time to go over them. Besides, they change on a day-to-day basis, so there's no way to plan what's going to be available one day and unavailable the next. Obviously I won't be able to get any of these until I can be sure I can save for it. I tried to think back to the last time I traveled and how much time I spent JUST on finding the plane tickets...and I remembered such horrible memories of how hard it was! Course, I didn't use the aforementioned sites at the time, so I guess the blame really is mine. My advice to people: Use well respected discount sites like the above mentioned.
Doing this on your own can be very stressful and take a long time. Here are the few I recommend the most:
Sites like Southwest and Delta had prices up to $2,000, so this was certainly a big savings. Going to "bargain saving" airlines is never recommended. For starters, I don't know if they are safe. Secondly, while the ticket itself might come in around reasonable $500 rates, the amount of taxes that are added on can literally be hundreds of dollars. This basically means there's very little (if any) money you're saving using these flights. And the flights might be unsafe to boot. Seriously folks, stick with the major airlines in this case. Booking hotel rooms can be a tricky thing as well. While a Google search for "paris+cheap hotels" yielded lots of results, most were a few hundred dollars a night or more. Hardly what I would call "cheap."
This is largely because only the major hotels in Paris really advertise on Google, and pay the high amounts of money to make sure their site shows up first in the search engine. The cheaper hotels are usually buried around page five of the search results. Thankfully, sites like Travelocity and Cheap Travel.com have made this experience a little easier to get around. They will sell you package deals on cheap (but reliable) flights and hotels. I typed in my planned departure dates: Nov. 6th - Nov. 13th. The cheapest deal I found was $1,685. This included a two stop, round way trip to Paris and about a weeks’ worth of nights at a Hilton Hotel (gee, THAT'S ironic). For an extra $100 I could get a non-stop flight.
For obvious reasons, this is an extra $100 dollars well spent. With each of these places they give you a list of hotel and airline packages, and there's simply no time to go over them. Besides, they change on a day-to-day basis, so there's no way to plan what's going to be available one day and unavailable the next. Obviously I won't be able to get any of these until I can be sure I can save for it. I tried to think back to the last time I traveled and how much time I spent JUST on finding the plane tickets...and I remembered such horrible memories of how hard it was! Course, I didn't use the aforementioned sites at the time, so I guess the blame really is mine. My advice to people: Use well respected discount sites like the above mentioned.
Doing this on your own can be very stressful and take a long time. Here are the few I recommend the most:
- Travelocity
- Cheap Travel.com
- Sky Scanner.net
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