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 four 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, you can't drive to another city.

Method

I used the websites expedia, kiwi, skyscanner, and kayak in researching this assignment.

Influence of travel dates and cities

Initially, I planned to fly to LAX (due to the last assignment which showed LAX to be cheaper than flying to NY) and began searching for flights on expedia out of LAX to the various continents. Before searching I used skyscanner to determine cheaper months to fly (which gave me months in the spring). From the previous assignment (and an article the professor posted), I learned that it is usually cheaper to fly on Tuesdays and Sundays. I began my search in the month of March on the first Sunday and began moving forwards through the months week by week focusing on Sundays and Tuesdays. I found some cheap prices; for Europe flights to London and Paris tended to be the cheapest, for Asia it was usually to a Chinese city, for Africa it was to a city near the Mediterranean Sea, and for South Africa it was usually to a country near the Caribbean Sea. I repeated my searching process again on kayak on a following day and found a few cheaper flights. On the next day I tried kiwi and found a way to search all the days over the entire year. This search method found me even cheaper flights to each of the four continents. None of the flights routed through LAX and a few I had to determine transportation and hotel costs for, but all of the flights I found on kiwi ended up being the cheapest. On the next day I searched again on kiwi repeating my process and found cheaper flights for a couple of the continents. On my first posting of this assignment I included the cost of a Chinese visa with the airfare. After reviewing my peers’ pages, I noticed a number of pages that were colored green that had flights to China but need not include the cost of the visa. For this second posting of this assignment I removed the cost of the Chinese visa. I ended up with a grand total of $2126.43 - $2138.43 for all four flights.