That's right, my first (and hopefully not last) international trip this year will be to Moscow and St Petersburg! I've heard some mixed reviews about women traveling to Russia, but ultimately the beautiful architecture, palaces and promises of all-night arts festivals won me over. As an advocate of public transit and art lover, the idea of subway stations that look like museums has me excitedly planning a day of exclusively exploring underground.
I've been checking plane ticket prices to Moscow (which is a more common route for us in North America) for months now, investigating possible sales (the conclusion is that there are very few sales on flights to Russia), flight routes (there are many, but few are direct) and times. Though I've been told time and again to shop around, even amongst online booking sites, I typically favour expedia.ca. They usually have the lowest fares and are completely reliable for flight and hotel bookings 100% of the time. I'd been eyeing a flight on their site for a few weeks, the price held steady at just under $1300 (most flights are between $1400-$1500), but much to my disappointment it started to go up 2 days before I was ready to book. You may have read on other sites that airfare sales typically begin on Tuesday afternoons, and by Wednesday, competitors of the airline may also drop their prices to match. This is your best window as a lot of sales end on Thursday. My "special fare" (as it was called on Expedia) had held steady for a few weeks so I was hoping it'd go on for another week, but by Thursday (while it was still listed as "special fare") the price was over $1300 and on Friday it was closer to $1400 with ridiculously early departure times. Early departures are usually cheapest; it's understandable that to save a buck you need to make some sacrifices, but sometimes it's near impossible to get to an airport for 4am in a foreign country. Not to mention a bit unsafe.
While mulling over what to do next, I decided to click on one of the advertised links, which took me one of those sites that search a bunch of travel booking engines simultaneously. I decided to give it a shot and see what options came up, one of the tabs was for CheapOAir, which I've used before to fly to Italy. At the time they were a U.S.-based site, but have now expanded to include a .ca site as well. The CheapOAir.com site pulled up a flight for $1133! To double check I opened a new window and went directly to the CheapOAir site to try the search again. Unbeknownst to me, it defaulted me to the Canadian CheapOAir.ca site, where the prices were on average $100 higher. Perplexed, I eyed the page from different angles until I noticed it wasn't the US site.
The only difference between booking on the US site vs the Canadian site is that you're charged in US dollars. With the dollar pretty much at par last week, it was quite the savings. Guess what the experts have been saying are true, from now on I will search more extensively instead of just booking anything that "looks reasonable" from my default travel site.
(Caveats: My flight was $1133 US, likely a bit over $1200 from CheapOAir.ca and not available through expedia.ca. It is Toronto via NYC to Moscow. On the way back I actually have to change airports. Flight from Moscow lands in JFK but my flight home to Toronto will leave from LaGuardia after a 4.5 hr layover. I'm pretty familiar with NYC and feel confident I can make my way to over in time to catch my flight home. Also it's the last leg going home so there's less on the line for me to mess up, absolute worse case scenario I miss my flight and they won't rebook me, alternate flights home are relatively cheap or I can even resort to a bus if I have to.)
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