Things To Remember – Last Minute Travel
The growth of the Internet and budget airlines has turned last-minute flights into a huge industry. As your surfing the web, right there, a flight cheap enough for you to buy on impulse and go away immediately. If you’re thinking about booking last minute flights, there are a few things you need to know.
An important point to make is that you can not trust the prices you see quoted in advertising for last minute flights. This is because of the common practice of excluding booking fees, airport taxes and all other extra fees. From the the time you’ve got your card out and your ready to pay, in the hope that by then you wont want to back out.
Also, you should realize that just because a flight says it goes to a big city like London or Paris, it doesn’t mean that the airport is actually anywhere near. Budget airlines use smaller airports to avoid paying the higher airport charges at the larger ones, and these smaller airports can be as much as two hours away from the city centre by often unreliable public transport. In some cases, you can end up paying as much as you did for your plane tickets just to get a train to the place you thought was your destination.
On airlines that take bookings for seats, it is also worth noting that last minute flights will only have the seats that no-one else wanted, which usually means they are the seats in the middle. This can be very important if you get airsick, or if you really want to sit together as a couple or family.
The biggest gotcha is that last-minute flights are always non-refundable. If you are going to buy one on impulse, make sure you can actually make it first, as there wont be any backing out of the deal afterwards.
