I see a lot of chatter online that is mostly political in nature about how the prices of everything has been going up around the world due to inflation or whatever the hell anyone wants to blame it on. I tend to not pay much attention to this because I kind of doubt the authenticity of a lot of it because the prices where I live have remained the same the entire time. It can't be a global issue then can it? I guess I don't worry about such things because I know there is nothing I can do about it and I don't think that politics should really play into it because I don't think that newly elected people are actually ever going to do something to change the situation anyway.
I didn't come here to talk about politics though: I hate them and this is one of the main things I am grateful for as far as my distance from USA is concerned in that there is no reason for me to get involved and therefore I choose not to.
I do however, have friends and family that are in the USA and it has been too long since I last visited them and I was a bit astounded at how much the cost of these international flights have gone up since the last time I booked one.
If you follow my stuff at all you probably already know that I hate to fly. I find airports to be the worst places on earth and that the people in charge of them do very little to change the very tense and annoying experience that is every single airport I have ever been in other than Changi in Singapore: They do it right at that place. As much as I hate flying I feel like a bit of a scumbag because I have not visited my parents in what will now be 6 years. I used to go every year but Covid happened initially, then there were visa issues, and then I just kept putting it off and I feel like a scumbag of a son for doing that. I finally decided to pull the trigger now and am going to head to North America for a month in October. It has been too long and I think that family is the most important thing in the world and I have been neglecting it for too long.
I went and did a search around 6 months ago just for hypothetical prices and back then I was really happy to find out that it was really easy to get an international flight for under $1000 round-trip. I kept checking here and there to make sure that things weren't changing too much and just put it off because at that time in my life there was still some uncertainty about my visa status. Once the visa thing was resolved I went back to these websites to discover that the flights, all of them, have increased in price by more than 50%. This was extremely worrying to me and initially I thought that perhaps it was because I put it off for too long and was considered a "last minute ticket" and they were just ripping me off. Therefore, I changed the dates but not the destination to look 2 months, 5 months, and even a year into the future. The price was the same as it would be for next month so this isn't some sort of time-sensitive issue.
I'm sure the airlines would chalk this up to fuel prices but I have a hard time not feeling as though this isn't just a coordinated strike on all of their parts to agree to raise prices across the board in order to rip us all off. It's not like I follow the price of crude oil or anything but I have a hard time believing that the price of this stuff went up 60% since earlier this year.
I made a commitment to visit and I am going to follow through. I will pay the $1600 that it is going to cost for this flight because it has been way too long since I last saw my mom and dad. $1600 is "car-buying money" over here in Vietnam so it does sting a little to have to shell out so much for something I hate to do anyway.
It is going to be something crazy like over 30 hours journey in each direction and I am definitely not looking forward to that! Thankfully you can just buy whatever sleeping pills you want at pharmacies over here without a prescription and trust me, I am going to be using them, especially for that really long bit where I fly over the pacific ocean.
It the price hike is indeed a fuel thing than I guess I don't understand why it is that flights from where I live to say, Bangkok, is the same as it was before. I think this is all a bunch of BS.
If any of you have traveled internationally recently I would be interested to hear what your experience was as far as the cost of the tickets is concerned.