Least Expensive Airfare to Four Continents

Least expensive air travel from Omaha to four continents - Europe, Asia, South America and Africa.

Outline

Ground rules
Method
Influence of travel dates
Least expensive round-trip to Europe
Least expensive round-trip to Asia
Least expensive round-trip to South America
Least expensive round-trip to Africa
Sum total of all three airfares

Ground rules

This is somewhat of a competition. I give extra points for the person with the least total airfare to all of these continents. All airfares must be roundtrip from Omaha, and must for be a three-week period from now until Sept. 1. It can be two different airlines, in which case you would present two different graphic files. The timing must be such that you can make the connection. Provide at least 3 hours. If the connection has you spending the night at the airport, you must include the cost of a hotel.

Generally, the least expensive fares to these destinations are from coastal cities in the US, like LA and New York. In order to get the lowest fare, you need to find the least expensive coastal city and the least expensive flight from Omaha to that city. Sites like Kayak and Expedia won't do this automatically. There may be some ground transportation involved in transferring to a nearby airport. Include the ground transportation cost and associated graphics. Bigger cities have multiple airports so don't get confused. New York, for example, has five airports: JFK, LaGuardia, Newark, White Plains, and Newburgh. Only three offer international flights. The cheapest flights are often from the smaller airports that charge a lesser fee for landing.

You don't need to check luggage but you do need to include a carry-on bag.

Prices vary widely during this period. They also vary by day of the week. You must present screenshots of the airfare with sufficient detail to verify the dates, connections, and price - including taxes. Use only commercial airlines - you can't use military aircraft or family connections with commercial companies. The flight leaves from Omaha â€“ you can't drive to another city.

Method

I used a variety of methods to not only find the best location to fly into and out of, but also to find the cheapest flights to those locations. Since I have never traveled abroad, I began to do some research on the cheapest international flights out of the United States. Once I began to find general regions, I did a google search of which airports in the region generally offer the cheapest flights. I used all of the websites such as Travelocity, Expedia, JustFly and even found a new cite I hadn’t seen before called Priceline. Although these cites offered a huge range of flights and prices, but they didn’t always have the cheapest flight available. One of the most common instances of this was searching for flights out of Omaha to a costal airport which offers cheaper international flight like LAX or JFK. I began to use the Airport abbreviations to google search which cites had flights to location. Once I had a list of different areas to look for the flights, I needed I began to cross examine them and narrow down to the best price available. When deciding which dates to put into the search I had to do some research about the area. For instance, while searching about flights into South America I got a tip from a website called (runawayguide.com) which told me mid-week flights after holidays are the cheapest time to fly to this region. This was also the case for other Regions such as Europe and Africa but didn’t ring true for my Asia flights which was surprisingly booked on a Friday.

Influence of travel dates and cities

I followed the three week parameter that we had and began to do some research on google. What I found to be true for most of the international flights I was looking at is that mid-week flights were the cheapest. Another thing I found online was to look for the popular attractions associated with these regions. I looked if there were more optimal times to go experience these things so I could avoid the “tourist season prices”. Holidays were a very big influencer on price spikes for every region and you can find this warning on pretty much any travel blog you read. With all of this new knowledge on how the date influences the price of flights I began to try to dodge these popular dates. Another tool I used which is a huge help is the calendar pricing on the travel sites. This allowed me to look how the price varied over not only week spans but months at a time. I was able to choose the best dates to take off and return based on the best priced flights on the calendar tool. I tried to take all of these things into consideration when looking for my flights to help me narrow down my list of potential flights. This is something that takes multiple times to do. For some reason I would perform similar if not identical searches, double checking to make sure I had the best prices and would notice that the numbers had change in no more than an hour. Google flights was also a very important influencer on finding the travel cities because of the way they distribute flights across the map. This allows you to easily see the different airports in the area and go do separate searches off google flight to find the best priced to these areas. In all of my flights I began with google flights looking for the locations I had research about landing at. Once I had the name of the airport and the surrounding airports, I was able to check multiple locations for cheaper flights. In some cases, I found that a flight may be the cheapest on google flights but not the cheapest out there. Google flights was used as sort of a steppingstone to other searches but defiantly one of the coolest/easiest flight search engines I have used.