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Side-trip too expensive? · Added by Annie on 24th Jun 2008
On our recent 'Exploring the East' trip, Chris and I had originally wanted to go to Japan. Having spent a couple of days there a year ago, we wanted to go back badly.
We spoke to our travel agent back in New Zealand about the possibility of a side-trip from South-East Asia to Japan. Our idea was to either have return tickets from somewhere like Hanoi to Tokyo and then from Hanoi to London, or to fly one way to Tokyo and then from Tokyo straight to London (since London was our final destination). We were somewhat surprised when she quoted us an extra $2500(!!) NZD each for both of these scenarios. That was almost as much as our return tickets to Europe had cost, but for one leg only! The travel agent told us that that was just what you pay to fly to Japan. Needless to say that our plans to see Japan went down the drain at that very instant.
However, once in South-East Asia (Bangkok to be precise), we decided to try our luck again and investigate how much it would cost us to fly to Japan from there. We wandered into a travel agent in downtown Bangkok and were quoted, for 2 return tickets from Bangkok to Japan (with a stop-over in Hong Kong for good measure), only about $900 NZD each. Japan was back in the game!
The moral of the story?
If you're planning a rather convoluted route and your travel agent back home quotes you a ridiculous price for your dream holiday, buy a return ticket (or one way!) to somewhere that you were planning to visit anyway and then, once you're there, look around for good deals on flights to your other far-fetched destinations. Buying airline tickets that don't depart from the country that you're physically in when buying the ticket will cost you easily two or three times as much as buying it from the departure country. Internet prices sometimes aren't worth it either. In my opinion, it's definitely best to wait and see what you can find once you get there. :)
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