On A Budget

Budget airlines suck. Fair play to them for trying to take on the giants of the aviation world but they are really just not that cost effective.

This would be the perfect time before I start ranting to tell you that I'm having another holiday. Lucky for me, B's sister has timeshares in some holiday apartment thingy and as she can't use it this year, she offered it to B. What this basically means is that we get free accommodation in some resort type place and only have to pay for flights and spending money. Wicked!

We are going to Lanzarote. I don't think it's too sophisticated or even cultural but there will be sun and it's a girly holiday so it will be a welcomed break!

Lanzarote is part of The Canary Islands and budget airlines cater a lot towards them. It appeals to chav in people (I'm a closet chav - what can I say?!). The usual price of a ticket would probably be around £199. And this is on a more recognised airline so I expected it to be a lil' bit cheaper (by about £50 for example).

Off I went to check out the prices. I used all the search engines, searched all the home pages of all the budget airlines I knew, I even went to page 20 on my returned Google search and the cheapest I found was £180! Now, this is not so bad. I'm willing to pay £180 instead of £199 but when I have to pay to put my luggage in the hold of the plane (ranging from £6 and upwards and this is per single trip so not even the return journey), then pay to choose my seats online (because you won't let me pay until I do this - £6 per single journey seat) and then try and include travel insurance (which I'll remove!) - the cost is so much more than the quoted "£180". So you see budget airline people - you're not that much of a budget!

But Scrumpy - Scrumpy is smart! (A lil' self appreciation never did anybody any harm!). I found a website that had tickets for £188.50. For the extra cost of £7.50 - I could add 5kg to the free baggage allowance of 15kg. So I removed it. And then I saw that when you search for flights - you could enter a promotional code.

These promotional codes sometimes come in emails that allow people who have subscribed to a newsletter/website to provide them with discounts. I hadn't subscribe to this so what did I do?

I Googled promotional codes for the website I was booking from and actually managed to find one! Enter the promotional code into the designated box and BAM - £15 discount off each ticket!

So all I paid was £166 per adult (inc. of taxes). I love a bargain!