Afraid Your Trip Won't Actually Happen? Just Buy Airplane Tickets

Well its official and the no refund policies of airlines have made it so; we are off to Austria this August!

I bought our tickets this week and confirmed accommodation with all huts so the trek part of our trip is mostly complete.

On this note I thought it might be good idea to share the flight planning experience. The combination of rising fuel costs (not new news, but I haven't flown much in the past few years) and traveling to Europe in the peak Season have made this airfare a larger portion of this type of a trip’s budget than before.

We will be flying to London (Gatwick) on Air Transat and then from London to Innsbruck on Easyjet. This seemed to be the cheapest way to get to Innsbruck, at least from Toronto. I did find a slightly cheaper trans-Atlantic flight on Sunwing but they did not get great reviews as an airline. We will take advantage of the London transfer point to spend 4 days in London at the end of the trip. I have been to London but not for many years and it will be a first time for my wife.

Planning Tools

For trip planning the route I used Expedia (always a good tool even if you buy with another source) and found that Wikipedia was useful for determining which airports provided connecting flights to which cities, and by which airlines. Here is a link the Innsbruck airport page on Wikipedia. I looked into various airports since I have found that Europe offers the chance to fly to another local airport (say for example Graz) and then train to your target city for less than flying direct. This tactic did not work in this case.

Discount Airlines and Using Buffalo's Airport

Remember to consider some of the discount airlines in Europe (not typically listed on Expedia) as options for moving around Europe. An example of this would be a recent search of Toronto to Innsbruck on Expedia for our travel dates. The result was (excluding flights with two stops) a cost for one stop flights starting at $1788 per person! Compare this to a flight from Toronto to London (available from Expedia) and then from London to Innsbruck (booked online with Easyjet) for only $1160 per person! In case those of you from the GTA were wondering, I also looked into the Buffalo thing (and before considering the extra costs of gas and parking) it was not even close to being a cheaper option..... at least not for this destination.

Direct Flights to Innsbruck? No Luck if You Live in N.A.

Assuming you want to fly direct to Innsbruck, check out the Destinations section of the Innsbruck airport for who flies into this airport and where those flight come from. This is useful for any future travel as you see all your options based on destination. For example you can see that Air Berlin flies to Innsbruck from Berlin, so that could be your first stop from Toronto. This is where I got the idea to look into Eaayjet from London as London is often the cheapest place in Europe to fly to from Toronto. One final note on direct flights to Innsbruck (the closest major airport to the Stubai Valley): according to Wikipedia, no airlines fly from N.A. direct to Innsbruck so (for us North Americans) plan for a connecting flight. If you know of one (even seasonal) then please post a response.