Flight Watching
There are really neat websites out there that will show you the cost of flights for various options. One example is FlightHub where it provides you a matrix of the cost of each departure and return date combination. I supposed you could figure this out yourself by multiple searches but it certainly saves you the time. You can also track flights and get daily emails of the lowest cost (which is never the actual flight that you want as it’s usually sucky departure and/or arrival times).
SO between the FlightHub matrix and figuring out how many days to spend in LA and in Disney, I came up with a good plan
This will give us 4 full days in LA and lets us keep our Disney days mid week, and lets us recover and get back to Ontario timezone before our kids start school on Tuesday (and DH and I back to work)
Note: Our kids don't know about our trip yet. Hopefully they won't be too upset about missing the last 2 days of camp.
For flights itself, we live near Toronto Ontario and basically narrowed it down to the following options:
- Fly Toronto to LAX both ways --> direct flight both ways
- Fly to LAX. Return from Orange County (SNA). --> direct there, 1-stop return
- Fly Toronto to Burbank. Return from Orange County (SNA). --> 1-stop both ways
- Fly Toronto to Orange County (SNA) both ways --> 1-stop both ways
- Drive to Buffalo (2.5-3hr drive) and fly to LAX --> 1-stop both ways
Option 1 is most expensive, but save hassle/stress of connecting flights. On return, we would have to drive back from Anaheim to LAX, which I hear can be a nasty drive.
Option 2 is $500 less than option 1, but has good flight times (e.g. on the way there, leaves 10am, on the way back leaves 9am). Also this option makes logistical sense considering we are starting in LA and ending in Anaheim.
Option 3 is $1000 less than option 1 (big difference!), but flight times are bad (e.g. on the way there, either leave at 6:30am, or another option arrives at 8:30pm at night…which is 11:30pm Ontario time...too late for our kids as we would still need to get luggage, rent car drive and check into hotel). However, makes most sense logistically since our hotel will be closer to Burbank airport than LAX.
Option 4 and 5 are similar in pricing to option 3. (As Canadian Girl mentions above, there is one direct flight from Buffalo but it doesn’t leave until night which doesn’t work for kids).
(I also looked at Long Beach but is more expensive than option 1 as is flying to San Diego)
Well, both emails from FlightHub and the Hopper app are telling me to book now. No idea how their prediction algorithms actually work or if they are accurate, but we'll probably book soon.
Pretty sure we’ll go with option 2 for reasons stated. We’ll still have a stop over on the way back, which is stressful as our layover options are 1 hr or 1 hr 42 min (better), both in San Francisco.