Did I miss the boat on a budget (Vueling) flight?

Where are you flying from and to? In the grand scheme of traveling, 30 Euros is no great cost increase so I wouldn't feel too bad about the increase.

I would not really expect the rate to come down. If you think the route has other competition, try www.skyscanner.com. But if you don't know whether you need the flight, you don't want to spend the money before you're sure.

Thank you all for your replies.

The flight is Barcelona to Granada. We are doing a Transatlantic cruise, followed by four nights in Barcelona. This is part of the puzzle of what comes next.

My options are:

9 additional nights - but I want to fit in Granada, Cordoba, Toledo and Madrid. Something's got to give and Granada is hardest to reach. All this will be done by train (or plane).

10 additional nights - ten is pushing it but just about doable. With ten I feel better about adding Granada. The cruise company is offering well priced one-way flights for coming home. I can choose to either come home from Madrid (which means flying to Granada right after Barcelona), or to come home from Granada (this is in fact cheaper than booking Vueling myself, but it requires two stops).

That is unless someone can work out a better route that hasn't occurred to me yet.

I agree that €30 isn't much in the scheme of the trip, but it bugs me when I could have done better if I had acted at the right time. Mind you that is per person, and being Canadian means around $100 total additional costs. Blast!

Does anyone have experience mixing classes of tickets on Vueling? We need to check one bag and wonder about buying one optima fare and one basic fare. Is that a recipe for disaster?

I have flown Vueling once, checked a bag, and had no problem. I bought the mid-range fare but was upgraded since the Excellence section was empty. I don't recall the price but it was cheap, and I kept getting emails from Vueling about reduced fares, so they can go down close to flight dates if seats remain empty. One flight was 19€ From Roma to Brussels.

Budget airlines don't seem to me to do pricing like the big legacy airlines. They seem to have cheaper seats, which then sell out and prices go up, and then when the next most expensive sell out, the price goes up again, and etc. At least this is how Easy Jet works, and I'm assuming Vueling is the same. With these airlines, you should buy as early as possible once you're sure of your dates/times, because the price does NOT come back down, it only goes up!

One thing I have noticed after years of participating in this forum is that people often get hung up on what, in the big picture of a trip, is a small expense. Some examples are: the cost of an IDP, and the cost of getting a little foreign currency before leaving home. My advice is to stop regretting that 30 euros. Make your decision based on what is the best and most convenient itinerary for you. You might also want to take a look at the thread in the General Europe section where people describe their travel splurges. Most of them are modest, limited indulgences, like taking a taxi to the hotel after a long flight. But, as a whole, they express a welcome antidote to some obsessive penny-pinching others voice here. Of course drawing the line is a very personal thing. I would pay $100 extra to avoid a flight with 2 stops. I'm not so sure about $200. $300; no.

I totally agree, Rosalyn, and don't usually worry about these amounts of money. Not that I'm rich - far from it - but in the end if I'm going on the trip, I'm going to see and do what I want and not nickel and dime myself to missing out on things.

My question was perhaps focused more on the price of the flight, whereas my follow-up post got more to the heart of my problem - how to fit in Granada, or if I should drop it.

Anyone have any ideas on the logistics?

Thanks.

Andrea,

Many budget airlines use a "sliding scale" for pricing, with prices increasing as the flight fills. Therefore it's not surprising that the flight increased in price. I doubt very much that the price will decrease now, so you'll either have to pay the higher cost or pick another flight that still has cheaper tickets.

Andrea, I think you can do it all and should do it all. It's one flight to Granada. It's a 2.5 hr train ride from Granada to Cordoba. It's a fast 1.75 from Cordoba to Madrid, whereas Madrid to Toledo is thirty minutes. Toledo could be a day trip. How about Granada 2, Cordoba 2, Madrid 4 or with a day trip to Toledo, and the option of adding one night in one of these three?

Bets, I did it! Sort of... just booked our flights home from Madrid which means next is booking our flight from BCN to GRX. I am going to post an itinerary question on the Spain boards, hope you chime in.