Help with Flights

[1927sully]

I'm thinking of booking 2020 with Free Disney Dining Package for 2 weeks from mid-July. I have never booked separate flights & am looking for hints/tips for the best time/expected price to book direct flights. Is it better to book a package, or would it work out cheaper to book it separately?

Many thanks in advance.

[Guest]

I don’t think there are any hard rules about whether it is cheaper to book separately or not. Sometimes it will be, sometimes it won’t.

There are also no rules about best time to book. Once you know you are going, check regularly and often, when a price you think is good comes up, book it and stop looking.

[cornishfrogboy]

This post is long!.. but needs to be and hopefully assists the thread starters question.. Others might lose the will to live.

Re package or diy, your chosen option is rather easy to price up with any Travel Agent and therefore you can diy research, get what you think is a ‘best price’ then invite the TA’s to beat it.

Now the research bit! I am no good at Disney and therefore would not venture to give advice on the best place to get a good price. Others may well suggest direct with Disney.. now the flights bit.

I believe that flights are generally cheaper in the mid week and that Fri, Sat Sunday is not the best value time to return.

Different airlines release flights at different times. In summer, Norwegian release at 355 ish, whilst many others release at 330. Search engines such as Google, Expedia, Skyscanner and Kayak generally only go out to 330. Travel companies with their own aircraft go out further and you can buy/research flights only from them.

RESEARCH.
When it comes to research, IMHO Google Flights take a lot of beating and for me, is noticeably superior to its rivals due to the research tools. That does not however mean that I necessarily purchase through them. I simply find it the best research tool.

1. It is alwaways desirable to find the cheapest periods to fly, cheapest day of the week to fly, cheapest place to leave from and cheapest place to arrive. This can all be achieved very easily by initially separating flights into one ways and single pax whilst using google. That is why, imho Google is superior to the others when carrying out research.

When you enter a flight as above, say London (any) to Orlando on 05 June, one way and one pax, direct then you will obviously get a number of flights thrown up. That is simply the start point. You can now use the tool bar to..
a) select nearby departure airports.and compare prices.
b) do the same for arrival airports.
C) look at a bar chart for cheapest flights every flying day right back to tomorrow. You can then click on the lower height bars and find out who is in competition on this day. An example would be that flights into certain airports are always cheaper on a day when Norwegian are flying the route as the others know that they have to compete. It doesn't mean that you have to take the Norwegian or even that it is cheapest, simply that it drives the other ones down through competition.
d) Before you do any of the above and simply search for flights, each day in every month has the cheapest price in the date box.

2. You repeat the exercise for your ideal return date.

3. You now have the best out and in Flights within your parameters. You may have amended your out and in dates and now have a 15, 16 or 17 day solution. You may be flying out and in on different airlines. Those are decisions that only you can take. You can now either combine your out and in, seeking a return flight deal, or keep them seperate whilst booking seperate. Again, your choice.

4. Now you take your selected 'best deal' flight dates and destinations and run them through Skyscanner, Expedia, Momodo, Kayak and most certainly the websites of the carrier airlines as well as any other search engine that suits you before eventually selecting your best deal.

As an example, (and I appreciate that your routing is different, but the principles still applies).
.
I am going to Boston in July before visiting NY, Dayton OH and then Orlando over a 3 week period. This is how that vacation was built.

I was expecting and hoping to depart and return through LHR as it is much more convenient than LGW from Cornwall.I wanted to see Boston and some other bits before having a few weeks in Florida. Those parameters were my start point. I was thus looking for London-Boston and Miami-London in July/August.

Through research on Google, I found that Norwegian did the Boston leg much cheaper than anyone else, but departed from LGW, rather than LHR. The day that suited best and at best price was Thurs 18 July.
Further research told me that the best deal coming home was from Fort Lauderdale and into LGW, but that this only flew on a Friday rather than the Thurs that would have given us a 21 day split. We thus decided on 22, returning on 09 August and happily decided to do the beach part of our vacation whilst enroute from Orlando to Fort Lauderdale, thus saving on mileage driven.
We then researched and found that there is no discount on return flights with Norwegian over buying seperate singles.
We then compared our chosen flight dates on all of the search engines that we could think of. Google remained cheapest by a decent margin.
We then went direct to the Norwegian site and found that they undercut all of the search engines. We decided to cut out the middle men and we booked direct with the airline. I now had an out and a return.
As a footnote it must be added that in the case of Norwegian (and others), hold baggage has to be paid for, and food and selected seats. That has to be weighed up against the fact that for £50pp each way we were able to select Exit row seats (£70 with Virgin Atl), hold baggage and meals. This still made our flights better value than rivals by a country mile. In fact, we only needed seats, meals and hold baggage on the return leg as we may be heavier in baggage and certainly don't want to pay food prices in a US departure lounge. Going out we only wanted to select seats, paying £25 for exit row! Our flight home has also since been moved to Miami, but this actually suits us better, but is nothing to do with research, rather restructuring by Norwegian.

Hoping this long post assists you.
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[1927sully]

Many thanks for your advice. Some really good pointers thanks!