Monday, July 27, 2009

Flight ObservationS

** I was looking up tickets between Cape Town in South Africa and Dubai and found a first class ticket for a direct flight for about 5000 dollars with Emirates.

On the same page on kayak.com I found another ticket with 2 stops for a third of the price, 1800 dollars, also first class. The first part is the flight from Cape Town to Dubai with Emirates, the same exact flight above, then from Dubai to Oman, then from Oman to Abu Dhabi which is pretty close to Dubai.

So what you have to do, is purchase the second ticket with the 2 stops to save 2/3rds of the price. Once you arrive at Dubai, leave the airport and do not take the 2 additional flights. If the airline asks you later why you didn't board on those flights, just tell them you had to take a big fat dump in the airport and were stuck there, which happened to me before but thanks to US airways which never leaves on time I was able to catch my flight.

** I looked up another ticket between Sydney and Buenos Aires. There's a 14-hour direct flight that takes off from Sydney at 11 am and arrives at Buenos Aires at 11 am on the same day! The explanation is that Sydney is 14 hours ahead of Buenos Aires in the timezone. Again, you leave at 11 am and you arrive at 11 am. That should work extremely well for you in the case you're thinking about murdering someone in Sydney. If you kill them at 11 am then take the flight, and the police later accuses you of murder, just say "I was in Argentina, how the fuck can I kill someone in Sydney at the same time?"

Disclaimer: I'm not flying anytime soon, just planning ahead for the 2014 World Cup. I also, in most cases, discourage homicide.

10 comments:

mab3oos said...

so, in which cases (as few as they might be) do you encourage homicide?

Khaled said...

5000 dollars for a flight? Is this the norm these days for airlines?

subzero said...

2014?

I remember 3 years ago u were planning to make it to 2010 by saving little amount everyday!

That did not work out well?

za3tar said...

You forgot one thing in your Capetown-Dubai trip ... what about your luggage ? On that multi-hop trip you will have to collect your luggage from Abu-Dhabi at the end.

As for me, i found that it is far much cheaper to book round-trip tickets from the USA to Britain and from Britain to Amman rather than a single tickets from USA to Britain then Amman then back to the USA.

I know airlines encourage people to buy round-trip to fill their seats, but at some tipping point I bet people will start prefering to buy round-trip and only using a single leg of the trip ... at the end, it will be cheaper for the consumers and the airline wouldn't have benefited.

Hareega said...

mab3oos.... in some cases like someone stealing your food, or an old guy driving way below the speed limit, and a few other cases

Khaled... for a first class 10-hour flights on Emirates that's a reasonable price.

zubzero... I know, good memory, didn't work out, visa and vacation issues and it's in south Africa which is not that encouraging to be honest, also Argentina performing very pporly and Jordan out of the qualification early made me less excited about this coming one -although deep inside I feel Argentina will kick some very serious ass

za3tar... that's a great about the luggage, though you might be able to pick in Dubai because the flight following that is with another airline from dubai to oman. Also as far as I remember you can ask to for your luggage to be picked up earlier in case you're traveling internationally, not sure about that though.

The only problem with you've mentioned is that I heard airlines can start charging you for misssing flights, I heard something about it on TV.

Anonymous said...

May I ask your recommendation for good websites to search for cheap airline tickets?

You mentioned kayak.com, does it always work?

Another thing, is it safe to purchase tickets online from such websites? How often do you do it?

Hareega said...

Anonymous, I have purchased over 40 plane tickets over the past 5 years from expedia (mostly), orbitz, and kayak.com.

All of them were internal flights inside the US, totally safe.

Kayak is preferred over the ones above for me at least because it compares prices from different websites.

The problem with these wbesites is that they exclude some airlines that do not pay them, like southwest and allegiant airlines for example. You have to go to the website of these airlines to purchase a ticket. Also purchasing from the airline's website can sometimes cost much more or sometimes a little less than the adversiting website.

Finally, make sure you print out the confirmation email.

Devilstine™ said...

haha!! dont u think they'll figure out the time difference and still accuse you for the murder?

Hareega said...

Devil... unless they read this post they won't know

Anonymous said...

i loved this. both ideas. great stuff!