Booked another flight deal!

Two years ago, I wrote an article titled How to Get the Best Airfare Deal.

The very first thing that I talk about is patience.

Well, for over three months, I've been watching for one particular airfare deal. But it had to be a fairly specific deal, because we need to end up near Alicante, Spain around January 6th in order to pick up the motorhome for two months. And ideally, we would be flying from and returning to, Ottawa.

Yesterday, my patience paid off!

It's often difficult for us to find a deal from Ottawa because Ottawa is located so close to both Toronto and Montreal. Montreal is closer to Ottawa, so if the price was right, we could have departed from Montreal. But it would have had to have been a ridiculously cheap flight in order to warrant departing from Toronto.

And so I was looking for flights departing from Ottawa or Montreal sometime between December 27th and January 3rd.

And the destination?

Well, we had some choices. Alicante is on the southern coast of Spain. That means that we'd like to arrive in either Madrid or Barcelona. But we could also arrive in either Paris or London, and take a cheap European discount flight from there to Alicante.

Alicante, Spain.

So you can see from the map above that Madrid and Barcelona are the closest major centers.

I had been looking for flights from Ottawa to Madrid, and return. But I had also been looking at the possibility of Ottawa to Madrid, but returning from Paris.

Checking the prices two or three times a day for the last three months only takes minutes per day. I have them set up on a link so that I simply hit the link on my favorites. Then, I also scan other prices if I have a few minutes. It's pretty easy to get an idea of the average price. This way, you know when a deal comes along.

Google flightsearch now has a historical indicator you can set up when you're watching a flight...

I set this one up about a month and a half ago, and then added a second flight to it.

Pretty easy to see that the average is around $720 return. You can see how often the price changes. Sometimes, it changes daily! The cheapest it went was $667, but I was pretty sure that it would go below $600 at some point.

Well the other day, I saw a flight that went from Ottawa to Barcelona return for $517. But the dates didn't line up, and it turned out that it was only for travel in May and June of 2017.

Yesterday morning, they had expanded those dates! I booked it for $519, plus we had a couple of $20 off coupons if we booked it through Flight Centre.

It turned out that you can only use one coupon per booking, and they beat the price by a buck, so we ended up paying $508 CAD ($395 USD) return per person, taxes included...a fantastic deal!

This morning, it is still on sale, but the price has increased to $536.

We fly out January 1st (what a great way to start the new year!) and return to Ottawa April 15th.

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