Five flexible airfare search tools for better travel

by Caitlin | Leave a comment

Siberian ice

I hosted a great travel event last week with my fellow travel meetup organizers. We asked a bunch of people what they were hoping to learn more about. This being Boston, there were a number of attendees who were interested in long-term bike travel across multiple continents, eco-tourism abroad, or teaching and volunteering overseas. (Beantown is a great city to meet people interested in sustainability and service, and I love that.)

But the vast majority of the people who showed up that stormy Wednesday night wanted to know one thing:

How do we find airfare that’s affordable enough to fit a lean travel budget? 

Not by using a single airfare comparison tool, and certainly not by sticking to a single set of dates or destinations. Traditional airfare comparison tools don’t give users much flexibility, even if they offer a “flexible dates” option or a nominal fare calendar. The travel search industry has, as a rule, focused on search parameters and functionality that give the overall advantage to—you guessed it!—the providers. Think about it: What do you want to know when you’re searching for travel options? When you can take a week off, you probably don’t want search tools that return a litany of set fares to a set destination for a set of specific dates. You’re not alone; most people don’t want that. What they do want is to know how they can get to Europe for under $500, no matter when. They want to know the cheapest destination in South America during April. They want to search for any warm place they can go for two weeks in the next three months. They want a search that will tell them the cheapest, coolest place they can go for a month—or six— if they leave tomorrow.

Bottom line? The when-and-where airfare guessing game sucks. It’s not how we travel, so it’s frustrating that it’s how we’ve had to search for travel. Fortunately, the travel search industry is starting to catch up a bit. Here are five tools you should definitely be using to travel better on a budget:

Google Flights: Google added the ability to search for flights to an entire region not too long ago, so you don’t have to specify a destination airport, or even a particular country. Google’s flight map will show you airfares for cities around a given region, and you can zoom out Google-Maps-style to see fares around the world. I’d rather not admit how many hours I’ve spent searching for flights from NYC to Egypt, or Boston to Africa. The date range is still static (for now), but you can play with that with our next tool.

ITA Software’s Matrix Airfare Search: Okay, so this one is technically Google now, too, since the search giant acquired ITA in 2010. The way it processes search queries is different, though, so until and unless Google’s travel team integrates the matrix search with Flights, you’ll want to use both tools independently to figure out the best dates and destinations. The matrix search lets you search for flexible dates or simply by fare calendar. It’s one of the best ways to figure out the cheapest times to fly to a given place. Combine it with Google Flights or one of the tools below, and you’re in business.

Adioso: Adioso has a lovely, visually striking design that puts its flexible search front and center. Search for travel the way you’d phrase it in conversation, like “Boston to China in September” or “Sydney to Anywhere for 10 days in June.” The company is a Y Combinator grad from a couple years back, and I have a feeling they’re just getting started.

Kayak Explore: Longtime search favorite Kayak debuted this nifty tool a while back. Explore lets you plug in a month or season (e.g., “Summer 2013″) and displays sample airfares around the world.  You can set a budget, set flight length, choose an activity (like “beach,” “gambling,” or “golf”), or search based on your preferred climate. This is another major time vortex. You’ve been warned.

Skyscanner’s ‘Everywhere’ option: Skyscanner is one of the better traditional airfare search engines out there; it pulls in some of the international budget airlines that many other engines skip over. By far my favorite Skyscanner feature, though, is its “To: Everywhere” search option. Plug your home airport into the departure field, choose “Everywhere” as your destination, and watch as the site comes up with a list of countries and fares. It won’t search every country, but if you’re looking for one nation in particular, you can click on it to get narrower results. This can work particularly well for last-minute deals.

Typical airfare-booking tips apply here. If you’re flying internationally, it’s almost always cheapest to fly mid-week, most often on a Wednesday. Booking on Tuesday afternoon will usually net you the best fares. And if you find a great fare using a search engine of any kind, you should always, always check the airline’s own website to see if you can book a lower fare than the search results advertised. Middlemen matter in travel—the fewer there are, the less money you’ll have to hand over to intermediaries.

Happy searching, kids. I’m off to figure out an affordable yet non-sweltering destination in Africa for nine days over the next two-to-three months. Welcome to the interwebs!

Should every woman travel solo?

by Caitlin | 2 Comments

Last year, there was a beautifully-written article in Salon.com with the provocative title “Every woman should travel alone.” The author, Sarah Hepola, described her five-month-long, 26-thousand-mile solo trip around North America and all the fear and exhilaration that came with it. Sarah’s points are trenchant: She learned much about taking care of herself. She grappled with the boundary between adventurous and reckless. She turned a series of disappointments into a stretch of time that redefined her perspective on her own life. She wished for all women the same opportunity: To understand deeply that not getting what you want can be a gift.

Hepola’s article sparked some debate, as does any article titled with a “should” statement. (Kate McCulley, one of my favorite solo female travel bloggers, brought this topic to my attention by addressing it in a recent interview with Hello Giggles.) As a woman who usually travels alone, I applaud Sarah’s trip and agree with many of her points on the value of solo travel for women. I disagree with the title point, though, if not the ethos behind it.

This particular question reminds me of another that’s been echoing through the tech sphere for the past week or so. Programmer superstars Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates lent their celebrity voices to Code.org’s campaign to get schools and other institutions to prioritize coding in education. This naturally spurred quite a bit of debate: A slew of tech personalities and publications used the Code.org campaign press as an opportunity to reinforce the popular tech-world idea that everyone should learn to code; many others insisted that such a maxim is unproductive and overly general. Personally, I felt the best—and most succinct—expression of the latter point came from Bay Area tech/design researcher Jake Levitas:

 

The same goes for the question of whether “should” is a word that can be reasonably applied to traveling alone. Of course not every woman should travel solo; nor should every man. Everyone, regardless of gender, should strive to understand and appreciate human experiences different than his or her own, and some of those people should travel solo.

My favorite travel experience is always the first

by Caitlin | Leave a comment

Several people have asked me recently:

What’s your favorite travel experience?

This question is always posed with well-intentioned interest and excitement, but it strikes me as strange. The ability to travel is an unimaginable luxury. It seems to me that having a favorite part of that privilege is extravagant. It’s possible I’m being too sensitive, but the enormity of my good luck hits me every time I hear that question.

I am one of the fortunate few. I was born in the right place, at the right time. Education, money, opportunity, the responsibility of steering my life’s own trajectory—all these things were given to me, and I was taught to value and prioritize them.When I was 13, my family sent me on a month-long group trip to Australia and New Zealand. It was my first time leaving the country, and it was extraordinary in every way. I’ve loved places ever since.

If pressed, my answer would be this: My favorite travel experience is always the first, and the place itself is unimportant. I suspect I share this feeling with many others who love places, who have been given (or have created for themselves) the ability to move through the world.

Music muted in Mali town

by Caitlin | Leave a comment

Last week, the BBC reported that Islamist fighters had taken over the town of Niafunke in central Mali. In a country that’s known for its vibrant, unique music, Niafunke is well-known as the birth place of Ali Farka Touré. Touré, famous both on and outside the African continent for his bluesy music , was hailed by Rolling Stone as one of the top 100 guitarists of all time. When the Islamist fighters took over, they banned music of any kind—even mobile ringtones.

“They are destroying our culture,” says another of Mali’s most famous singers, Salif Keita. He is currently back home in Mali, preparing for a world tour to accompany the release of his latest album.

“If there’s no music, no Timbuktu, it means that there is no more culture in Mali,” he adds, sitting in the grounds of his home on the small island he owns on the river Niger outside the capital, Bamako.

Mali has been on my travel bucket list since I heard about the country’s renowned “Festival in the Desert” a few years back. Festival au Désert is a music festival (in the desert, funnily enough) that showcases traditional Malian music but also features tunes from world performers like Robert Plant and Beck. A couple of years ago, I stumbled across a Malian band called Tinariwen by accident. While downloading some of their stuff, I looked them up; lo and behold, they first burst onto the music scene at this music festival in Mali in 2001. A few other Malian groups that have been highlighted a little in Western media (e.g., Amadou and Mariam) have also been big at the festival. Reading about it really put Mali on the map for me, and it’s heartbreaking that something so central to people’s sense of culture, joy, and self has been taken from them.

When I first moved to London to study in the winter of 2006, I remember my program coordinator talking about how listening to music in a new place detracts from a traveler’s experience of that place. I can understand how that might be true, but I’ve always traveled with music constantly echoing in my ears. My iPod is the single most beloved travel companion I’ve ever had, and rather than detracting from experiencing a place fully, I feel strongly that music helps me remember moments in time much more vividly. When I was 13, my parents sent me on a month-long trip to Australia and New Zealand with a group of 40 other kids. I remember far less of this trip than I’d like to; one of the inevitable side effects of traveling as a teenager, with dozens of other teenagers, is that you end up paying much more attention to your peers than to your surroundings. Nevertheless, there are a few moments that stand out in my memory: sitting on a bus on the way to Wellington with the Kiwi countryside flying by outside my window, listening to a Sarah McLachlan CD on my Discman (hey, no judging); singing Amazing Grace in a Maori lodge near Rotorua for the Maoris who had cooked us a traditional dinner; walking on the beach in Melbourne with the soundtrack to Baz Luhrmann’s remake of Romeo + Juliet playing.

Music was central in the way I experienced things; that hasn’t changed as I’ve gotten older. I associate Damien Rice songs with standing on a whitewashed balcony on Santorini, looking out over the bay at the caldera. I first discovered the Dandy Warhols while tramping through ruins and ancient alleyways in Athens, first heard TV on the Radio’s sublime “Province” looking out at rice paddies from a bus in rural Korea. The Beatles’s “I’ve Got A Feeling” will always and forever be my go-to song when I’m riding the London Tube during rush hour. And hearing the opening chords of “Beast of Burden” by the immortal Rolling Stones instantly transports me to the backseat of my college roommate’s car, cruising down a blissfully empty Los Angeles freeway on a late summer night in 2007.

Whether at home or on the road somewhere across the world, music to me is synonymous with consciousness, with transformation. My heart goes out to the people of Niafunke for the silence imposed upon them; may it end before long.

The best part of overnight buses in Thailand

by Caitlin | Leave a comment

Most people who have spent time traveling through Southeast Asia have had the memorable experience of an overnight bus (or twelve) to, from, or through Bangkok. There’s a lot to be said about Bangkok, and perhaps I’ve simply not given it a fair shot, but it’s not my favorite city. Thus, when I was leaving Siem Reap with my brain and my memory card both drenched in temple shots, I made an executive decision to go for the long-haul bus ride that departed Cambodia at 6 AM, made a frantic bus switch in BKK, and barreled a couple hundred miles south to the port city of Chumphon.

This was a bad idea for several reasons:

  • The night before I left was Khmer New Year. (In theory,  this means country-wide celebration and anticipation of the coming rains.)
  • In practice, Khmer New Year means a lot of drinking with the locals and staying up until 5 AM because it’s 110 degrees at night and there are heat blackouts everywhere.
  • Did I mention the whole point of my plan was to be on a bus at 6 AM?

The equation, therefore, goes like this: Long overland journey plan + alcohol-soaked Khmer celebrations – electricity  = 6 AM bus ride hungover and exhausted. Some people conk out easily on buses; I, alas, am not one of them, so I spent the first six hours of the bus ride trying not to hurl the previous night’s fish and rice all over the tiny Cambodian woman next to me.

You’re probably wondering where the “best” part of this post comes in. Patience.

Fortunately, the border crossing from Cambodia to Thailand at Aranyaprathet  is much more orderly, and has far fewer wandering chickens, than the Lao-Cambodian border. A quick plate of street noodles in Bangkok helped clamp down the lingering hangover, and somewhere circa 8 PM, I jumped on a crowded overnight bus full of backpackers at one of Bangkok’s many bus depots. Overnight buses in Southeast Asia, to me, have come to mean a few very specific things:

  1. If the bus identifies as “luxury,” there will be a bad American movie playing. In some cases, this bad American movie will be badly dubbed in Thai or Vietnamese for added hilarity.
  2. There will almost always be a stop for food at a roadside café owned by the uncle or childhood best friend or third cousin of the bus driver/tour operator. You should use your discretion as to whether to eat at these roadside cafés. Some are perfectly fine, and others are an inadvisable form of nourishment. Taking some form of packaged food and a bottle of water with you from the start is the best option if you don’t want to be hungry or thirsty on a multi-day bus trip.
  3. I will inevitably have to pee at least three times on these trips. Occasionally there is a bus bathroom. More often the bus will stop (typically no more than twice) at predetermined intervals for backpacker bathroom breaks. Bus bathrooms will be gross. Roadside café bathrooms are occasionally less gross, but the likelihood of having to play dodge-the-cockroach is higher.
  4. Sleep is hard, if not impossible, to come by.

There were no exceptions to these faux-rules on this particular trip. The blaring bus TV played a badly-dubbed version of that Leonardo DiCaprio Shutter Island movie, I chose to forgo the roadside food, I won one game of dodge-the-roach and lost another (this resulted in doing the Cockroach Dance), and sleep evaded me.

The bus was scheduled to arrive at the dock in Chumphon around 5:30 AM. The first boat to Ko Tao, a tiny dive-centric island in the Gulf of Thailand, departed at 7. I and the scant handful of other travelers who got off the bus at Chumphon, however, were more than a little surprised when the bus arrived not at dawn, but at 1:45 AM. The pier was deserted. The dock is not in an inhabited area, unless you counted the dogs rummaging for scraps nearby. The two other solo travelers who were left on the pier as the bus rumbled off quickly came to the same conclusion I did: The only thing to do was to try to keep the dogs away and, if possible, grab a bit of sleep on the trash-strewn cement.

Six hours later, the first boat left for Ko Tao. The crowd on the pier had grown slowly as the night wore on and more buses dropped their passengers unceremoniously onto the Chumphon dock. Nobody got bitten by the pack of dogs, and a few even managed to steal an hour or two of sleep on the cement ground.

The best part: Shortly before 6 AM, the sun rose.

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