Airfare consolidators - flight from US to either Ireland, Scotland, Belgium
 

My wife and I are looking to travel from Kansas City (US) to Europe for an approximate two week vacation beginning in probably mid August 2010. We have not locked down any specific travels dates. When we flew to Germany ten years ago, we used an airfare consolidator and received a good flight fare rate.

We have not pinpointed down our destinations yet but are considering Ireland, Scotland, Belgium, possibly northern France or the Norway area. I would imagine we would fly into one location, and fly out of a different location for our trip home.

Are there certain days of the week it is cheaper to fly into and out of Europe? Also, due to the various airline hubs in the cities of some of these countries, would any of the locations be better cost wise to fly into verses others? Sorry for being vague, I am just trying to get a feel at the moment and am still developing my questions in my head as well, lol.

Thank you in advance

Welcome to the new world order. The old bargain fares are gone.

I can't help too much with the details (others are much more frequent travelers than I), but I wanted to make sure that you knew about kayak.com. It's a great site where you can plug in various combinations of dates/locations/multi-city itineraries to your heart's content, and it will search lots of sites for you. (It will search the airlines' direct sites, but can also puts the same itinerary into Expedia, Priceline, etc if you tell it to.) The prices it quotes include taxes and fees, and it takes you directly to whichever site it found the fare on to purchase.

I have found in searching that it's usually cheaper to leave/return in the middle of the week - say, Tuesday or Wednesday - than on a weekend.

Yes Jent, I am aware of Kayak. I had started my search there. I was just not sure if the timing of my trip was off and thus, costing me money or if this is just the norm now.

Thank you for responding.

It's a little late to be looking for cheap flights for this August. Did you mean 2011?

nope, 2010. I know it is somewhat last minute but I am still about a month ahead of my desired travel dates.

Flying into Ireland and out of Belgium would be a good idea in my opinion. You can fly into Shannon and do the West coast of ireland in about 5 days or so, and a night in Dublin. You "should" get good weather in August.

Ryanair.com will give you good value flights internally in europe! They are a budget airline- so you get what you pay for. If you are coming with lots of luggage then perhaps fly with a national carrier! But they should have good rates on onward flights to Paris, where you could spend another few days before taking the TGV to Brussels and going on a day trip from Brussels to Bruges!

About a month ahead is really to late to shop fares. At this point, especially for travel during high season, the fares are more likely to go up (and up) than down.

A consolidator I've been using for many years (and saved a fortune with) barely beats the fares directly through the airlines now.

Over the last ten years, cheap last minute fares have vanished and normal fares have just about doubled.

Generally speaking, Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and sometimes Saturdays, have the lowest fares, but probably won't matter this close to any dates in August.

You can still find fairly low cost flights within Europe for mid to late August on some of the European low cost airlines like Ryanair and Norwegian. For many routes on these airlines it is only during the last 1-2 weeks before departure fares skyrocket. You'll find these and other European budget airlines on http://www.euroflights.info/

For instance you can fly from Edinburgh to Oslo on Norwegian in the second half of August for USD 110-130. Flying to Bergen would cost you around twice that.

If you book on Ryanair be aware that during August they charge EUR 30 and EUR 40 for your first and second bag. The first bag has a max weight of 20kg and the second a max weight of 15kg. The are aggressively charging for overweight baggage.

Guys, thank you for all the feedback so far. I really appreciate it. I will check out the airlines mentioned thus far.

Consider hub airports like Heathrow - it can be cheaper to fly to your final destination via a hub than it is to fly into that hub alone. Just don't ditch the onward journey or you will invalidate your return leg.

Look at the legacy airlines within Europe too - often by the time you have paid all the extras on Ryanair/Easyjet you could have flown cheaper with say Aer Lingus. Especially this close to your travel dates.

Hetismij, thank you for information regarding Aer Lingus.

Using that airline, two of us can fly from Kansas City (central USA) to Dublin, round trip for $1074 US. That is a pretty good rate for flying with one month's advance notice.

The site is a bit goofy though. If I select my starting destination as KC (airport code MCI) then it will only let me select Dublin Ireland as a destination, even though we are connecting another flight in Chicago. The only way it will give me a route back to KC is if we fly back out of Dublin, again passing thru Chicago.

If I select Chicago as a starting point, then I can pick other destinations beside Dublin and can fly back out of a different country back to Chicago. However, if I do that, I have to arrange and pay for separate flights to and from Chicago.

Is that $537 roundtrip each person???

Sorry, I had inputted two people and it kicked out that amt for the total; however, when I actually when to Continue to book the flights, it showed that amt was for one passenger.

Wow. As you know this is really late to find low fares. We've used europeandestinations.com about 2 years ago with great success, but we booked in February for July.

They have a toll-free number so I wouldn't mess with inputting dates/destinations, etc on-line; I'd call and talk to one of their representatives and see if there's anything they can do. Staff was very helpful in setting up flight/hotel and car.

Good luck.