The de-I Guide to Air Travel Planning - Part Three - Conducting a Sample Search (Part One)

Enough of preparation and background, let's look at how this plays out when one actually wants to find a flight.

Let's put together a hypothetical example. For this example, I am going to do a search I've never done before. Let's assume I want to go from Cleveland Ohio to Ljubljana, Slovenia and back in April of 2026 for two weeks starting the second week of April and that I want to travel business class on the over Atlantic portion of my trip in both directions.

Before I even start to search, I will take the following things in account:

• Trying to book flights from a spoke city to a spoke city will almost always end up with something more expensive and convoluted. 
• The better option is usually to book your over ocean flight from hub to hub and do a self-connect to get to your final destination.
• Or do a hub in the U.S. to your international spoke city
• Except for those situations where the spoke to spoke route comes out better.

Totally confused? Let's actually do this and see if we can shed light on how it works. 

I start by doing a search using a site that aggregates flight information from many airlines. I used to be a big fan of Kayak. But recently I've moved to Google Flights  because of a feature that allows you to put in up to 7 departure cities and arrival cities in one search. It also shows just airline deals and not agency deals. I don't do agencies. That is another post altogether.

 Okay let's do the search

WTF!!!!

Okay, one clearly has a helluva a lot better options from Cleveland than from Albuquerque lol. These are seriously good options. A business class round trip fare from spoke to spoke for under $4 thousand with two stops, and 13 to 18 hours total travel time is a killer deal. $5 thousand for transatlantic would be a more normal low end price. Just for grins, let's see what this would look like from my home town of Albuquerque.

Now we're seeing what I normally run into. Take into account that Wife and I fly and that $4,200 to $4,600 fare translates into $8,400 to $9,200. That is about what I would expect to find.

 Let's change the locale we are going to. Let's say we are going from Cleveland to either Kuala Lumpur or Singapore.

Those are in the almost $9 thousand and up for two people. Looking at going from Albuquerque.

Similar pricing

But one needs to look beyond the price to see the total travel experience. Notice on each listing you will see it has the total hours of travel time and the number of stops. If one clicks on the arrow to the far right, you will get the details of the flight including what kind of aircraft is being used. This can be significant as there is a wide variety of comfort available depending on the aircraft per airline. 

So let me give you a bit of homework. Go to Google Flights and enter the exact parameters I have for this Albuquerque to Kuala Lumpur or Singapore route in April. Then go click on the flight details and study what you see. In the next post, we will start to analyze this information because it can be key to the kind of total flight experience you might have. 

And we will look at the options to us if we look at a hub to hub routing with our doing a self-connection to get to the hub.