N. Spain air fares
 

Any advice on flights for a trip to northern Spain and Portugal in September ? Departure from Chicago, St. Louis or Iowa airports. Are there any destination airports that might be more economical than others ? I have been looking at Madrid and Bilbao. Thanks.

Watch out for Iberia...My son was 36 hours delayed out of ORD into MAD the week before Easter..Iberia strikes Fridays and Mondays and throws all the airlines into chaos..Perhaps your timimg will counteract that.

I think the airfares defy simplistic fly to this airport, book on this day of the week, book so many weeks in advance type of logic anymore. They operate on a market driven revenue enhancement model. Routes with more carrier competitions (Madrid, for example) tend to foster competitive prices, but even so, there are some bizarre price swings.
There are fewer flights into Bilbao than to Madrid from most departure points. This tends to increase the price for this segment, but can come up ahead overall if you do the math. Supposed you land in Madrid first, would you connected to Bilbao on a flight booked on the same reservation, book a budget carrier separately, use a Renfe train, etc?

I think a practical way to deal with the market driven fare is to keep track of the market. To do this, you have to set up alerts at places like Kayak.com, select daily update. Set up many possible routes: different departure dates, return dates, different airports, etc.

Open jaw flights often lower the overall cost. Many people are lured by more attractive roundtrip fares to airports away from the real destinations but actually end up paying more overall by having to make connection to the real destinations. It also means less time at the real destinations. Fare alerts usually cannot do open jaw trips. But you can approximate the cost by doing roundtrip fare alert at the arriving airport and another alert at the departing airport.

You can combine long haul carriers and low cost carriers such as Vueling. However, you need to look at the overall cost, and how well they integrate into your itinerary. If you search this forum, there are many posts by those who got into troubles by not fully considering the connections between long-haul and budget airlines. Such connections require retrieving the luggage and recheck in with many additional hours of layover time. Furthermore, you are usually not protected from the missed flight due to the arrival delay of the previous flight.

I'm in total agreement with Greg, but I'll add to check Air France (they don't always show up on kayak, etc.). I do think Bilbao is your best bet, but second the open-jaw recommendation as well. I was seeing good fares to Vigo (Galicia) this spring.

Back in April the pilots called off the strike.

http://bit.ly/stike-off
To see which airlines fly to Bilbao look at this link.

http://bit.ly/airport-Bilbao

You can then do your own planning.
Or an easier route is use this website.
http://www.skyscanner.net


There too many permutations for me wto work out which is going to suit you te best, sorry.

You can check flights into Santander, Gijon, Pamplona and San Sebastian-Donostia, but you'll have more options with flights into Bilbao, which is an international airport.

Iberia/American, British and US Airways flies out of St. Louis. You can also check flights out of Minneapolis/St. Paul and Des Moines (Air France, Delta, United and US Airways). All require two stops.

US Airways has a seasonal direct flight from Philadelphia to Lisbon.

Thanks to all. Very helpful info to get me started.

Air France can often be competitive when continental cities are added on to a trans-Atlantic flight. I ran a mid-September test from Chicago through Paris to Bilbao and found prices as low as $1,000. On the same dates, going to Paris alone cost $100 more. Yes, more for less. http://www.airfrance.us/cgi-bin/AF/U...icket-plane.do