Hi there, I'm Alex.
Can't say anything cool about me, seems like I'm an ordinary 24 yeards old man from Germany.
A few weeks ago me and my wife had a short trip to Greece, where her old classmate lives. We got a postcard from her with a view of Navagio Beach. Here it is.
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Nice, isn't it? That's really one of the best places in the world I've ever seen, so we decided (pretty fast) to take a journey to Zakynthos Island. We didn't have that much money to afford a tour, so we had to plan everything ourselfs.
I bet most of the backpack travellers know what a headache it is to sort all the things, which come up down the road. Tickets, hotels, road fees and all that stuff. And now I want to tell you about the lesson I've learned this time)
Flight Tickets
You all know about the Skyscanner or european lowcosts like Ryanair or Easyjet, which help so much with finding the best fare for a flight from A to B. I've found the best price for a flight from Berlin to Athens and back 1 week later. It was about 240€ (for 2) but I had to put more money on a credit card in order to buy them. And here comes the first stone. The day after, when the bank had finally approved the money I put on a card, I've found that the total price for a flight was a bit higher 303€.
The earlier you buy - the cheaper the price will be. I knew that. What I didn't know is that 31 June and 1st July is a big difference. It seems that Ryanair's system applies the regular orice changes based on the monthly period. Ok, 63€ not a big deal. The second stone came up a bit later.
We got to Berlin with a Flixbus for about 10€/person and managed to get to the Schonefeld Airport. Got our check-ins and were already staying in the queue to the security control.
It was at this moment, Jackson knew he fucked up.
I realised that one ticket was for 5th July and the second for 7th July. I saw the tickets about 7 times, 2-3 times in the internet, 2-3 times when I printed them and 1 time on the phone but I DIDN'T CHECK THE !@#!@# Date!
During the HOUR OF TEARS I've learned that:
- there was no place anymore for 5th July
- an airport could move the expired ticket to 6th for a 100€ fee
- they couldn't do the same with the future ticket, I needed to contact ryanair
I've used an old PC with just an IE installed to contact them and spent about an hour for a solution.
They needed to uncheck my wife and then I could change the date myself with their site/app. It's a pity I didn't do it earlier, there is no fee if you do this during the first 24 hours). At high season the change costs 60€ fee plus the difference of the ticket price. As it's for tomorrow, the price is the highest, so I've paid about 130€ more to move it to 6th July as well.
Then I couldn't decline my booking with [Airbnb] (https://www.airbnb.com/), so we needed to make another one for tomorrow with another host. And lastly we needed to beat our previous record (9 hours) of staying in the airport area with the new 24 hours one.
That's how you can easily double the price in the race for a cheap tickets from 240€ to 533€ just because of your inattentiveness and selfconfidence.