Travel travel travel. Oh, how much we love this word. But the problem is, it's not always easy to find tickets to your dream destinations for the price we want. My friend and I were planning our next holidays in May and wanted to explore the Spanish islands like Tenerife and Grand Canaria. After some time researching, I realized I couldn't find tickets cheaper than 112 euro one-way, which is not very expensive, but I used to travel for 30-150 round trip and 112 euro one-way seemed a bit overpriced and I felt I could find something cheaper. And I did, 60 euro one-way (including a bus ticket). How? Easy!
If you search tickets with Skyscanner or Kayak or other similar searching engines, it will find you lots of different variations, but not all possible, because it would be a very big number!!!
What you can do is to use different websites of budget airlines to check yourself if they have nice offers and try to combine a few of them according to the time and airports of the destination or change point. In some airline they don't have daily flights to every destination, so it is very possible that you will have to stay there overnight and if it's nothing expansive and for example, you haven't been there before, could be a nice plan for your travel.
Also check flights from the nearest airports and cities, for example, I live near Munich and Munich has most expensive airport in Germany which automatically means that no budget flights are available from the airport (There are a few budget flights though, but they are all to England, which is not where I want). The closest to Munich airport with cheap flights is 1,5 hours away from it and with all the connections it will take me 5 (!!!) hours to get there. I used it a lot, and it's so messed up to go there and literally spend the whole day just to get to the airport. I will, as well, have to pay 25 euros for the train ticket and sometimes even more! A lot of the time, I thought how much it sucks that I pay twice as much as my flight ticket just to get to the airport, but it was still cheaper than flying from Munich.
It took me some time to think it through and check the nearest cities and airports to find that there is a nice airport with a big range of budget flights from Nuremberg, which on the map seemed considerably further, that in the reality appeared even more convenient that the Munich airport. I found that there's a two hours bus directly from my city to Nuremberg and costs only 11 euro (I checked Flixbus).
Then, because Tenerife belongs to Spain, I figured out that the flights within the country must be cheaper and I also remember checking tickets from Barcelona when I was there and the cheapest destinations were also in Spain, so I started looking for flights to any big city in Spain, which is not too many. The first option was Barcelona, but the tickets were already pricey, the second choice was Madrid and here you go, 30-euro ticket for the evening which perfectly worked with the bus schedule. Then I checked if I could go to Tenerife and, of course, I could, for 20 euro. So, 11 + 30 + 20 =61 euro instead of 112. Yes, it's a little longer. Yes, I will have to change in Madrid. But I’m still saving some coins, even though not much.
So, if you want to find your own way of budget travelling, take some time to find best airports (which doesn't mean the nearest ones), bus connections. I would not recommend using Blabla Car for this purpose, as I witnessed myself a few times that cars were cancelled in the last minute or a driver didn't appear and it might cause you some unwanted stress. This also might happen with busses that's why it makes sense to count your time right.
Thanks for reading and wish you only most amazing journeys! xx
Valeriya