Just out of curiousity, I went to flychina.com and ran various airports through their system to see what the fares would be if I were able to book today for the dates when we THINK we will be going to China. Since we don't know for sure, obviously, I cannot book our tickets yet. If the trend I discovered holds true, it looks like we will be best off flying out of St. Louis.
I used December 24 & January 8 as our dates and indicated that we were flexible by one day. Most of the locations fell forward to December 25 as our departure and fell back to January 7 as our return flight (the 7th might be a day sooner than we'd be able to return though). Anyway, using those dates, here are the prices and routes I discovered:
Springfield Capital Airport - $1670
Springfield to Chicago to Hong Kong
Hong Kong to San Francisco to Chicago to Springfield
Chicago O'Hare - $1650
Chicago to Hong Kong
Hong Kong to Newark to Chicago
Chicago Midway defaulted back to Chicago O'Hare.
Peoria - $1563
Peoria to Chicago to Hong Kong
Hong Kong to Chicago to Peoria
Bloomington - $1536
Bloomington to Atlanta to Detroit to Hong Kong
Hong Kong to Tokyo to Minneapolis to Bloomington
Indianapolis was similar to Bloomington in price and stops (two each way).
St. Louis - $1424
St. Louis to Chicago to Hong Kong
Hong Kong to San Francisco to Denver to St. Louis
OR
St. Louis - $1472
St. Louis to Chicago to Hong Kong
Hong Kong to San Francisco to St. Louis
Obviously, the price we'll pay will be different, since we'll be buying our tickets roughly two weeks before we leave. Plus, I'll probably be buying them through a Chinese travel agent rather than booking them myself. A woman at work who is Russian told me that she gets better prices to go to Russia when she books through a Russian travel agent. So, I approached another woman here at work who is Chinese. She said the same thing -- that when she flies to China, shes gets the best rate when she goes through Chinese travel agencies...sometimes up to $300 cheaper per ticket than even Priceline.
This blog began as a place to share Shaling's journey from rice in China to popcorn in Illinois. However, it has evolved to include all sorts of happenings in the Reynolds family.
No comments:
Post a Comment