I am now deep within one of the greatest games ever played in the history of mankind. The stakes are high, the rules obscure and complex at best, and the reward uncertain. However, millions of people continue to play it every day of every year, hoping to press the right buttons in the right sequence and bag themselves a trophy.

I’m playing the Airline Ticket Game.

Now that we’ve secured a good, solid $2,500 to start spending on our airline tickets for our upcoming trip in Feb/Mar, I’ve been on the prowl for the past week or so to find the sweet spot in this incredibly convoluted and asinine industry so we can fly to Australia without losing body parts to loan sharks in the process.

The Long Kiss Goodbye
In planning an international experience such as this, the first step is to get the biggest step done first — the long leap over the ocean. Once that one is in place, all the little flights to/from the major destination points will have to be filled in, but since they’re more flexible, they’re easier to do later.

The big problem with the “large” flight is that it’s fucking expensive, and, apparently, February/March must be an ideal time to fly to Australia, because NOTHING is turning out to be cheap. Let’s see what is available, shall we?

• LAX to SYD on Qantas – $1254 – My preferred airline for weathering the 15+ hour flight across the Pacific just put up a sale, but not for the dates we want/need, of course. Yolanda would like to leave on the 4th of Feb, but the sale is either for the 3rd or 6th, and the flight on the 3rd is a night flight into Sydney, meaning that you get into SYD around 10:30pm and have to either find a hotel or stay at the airport in a locked-off section for the entire evening until flights start up again in the morning. I am happy to do this, but I suspect My Sweet Love™ will not look fondly upon this idea. The bonus of both of these flights (mine and hers) is that we CAN book the same flight back to LAX on the 19th of March, which is what she’d really, really like to do.
  
• MSP to HNL, HNL to SYD – $1200ish – This is an odd one; JetStar, a “discount” airline (on the order of JetBlue, etc.) has $550 flights to Sydney from Honolulu, direct. It’s a hell of a deal. The problem is getting to HNL, which, to get a decent price (read: below $700) so far consists of 15+ hour flights across the USA, stopping at anywhere from Seattle (very much on the way, but still incurrs a NINE HOUR layover) to some crazy, shitty route like the one I found: Minneapolis to Phoenix to FUCKING LA GUARDIA to HNL — you must be joking. Once you then GET to HNL, you have to spend the night, somewhere, and then board another 9-hour flight the next day to Sydney. All in all, you’d end up spending twice as long to get to Australia. Screw that, I’ll pay an extra $100 for the convenience of…uhm…NOT.
  
• LAX to ADL via Air New Zealand — You just have to appreciate an airline that paints its planes with images from The Lord of the Rings. And their flight specials, starting Feb 01 (according to their website) are pretty damned good, too. In fact, they have a kickass flight that goes LAX to AKL (Auckland) and from there the ADL (Adelaide), which is where we have to go anyway, all for $1300USD. That’s an incredible price! A pity that once you actually search for a flight you can’t find anything prior to Feb 16th as a departure date. Thanks, ANZ, for getting my hopes up high enough that they’ll splatter nicely on the rocks below.

This is just a rough sample, and I won’t bore you with more, but you get the picture.

NOW — one important thing to note is that this ONLY applies to today! Yes, tomorrow, or even tonight, these could all be different.

This is my biggest gripe about the game — the prices change, seemingly by random, as flights are added and dropped, routes are changed, stopovers manipulated, and price points shuffled. Airlines are some of the largest consumers of mathematicians doing things like statistics, probability, and econ. In fact, I suspect many econ professors around the world spend their off hours masturbating to the mere thought of being employed by an airline and asked to figure out their pricing scheme. It’s an incredibly complex exercise in coercion, manipulation, and shuffling.

For the consumer, it’s an effort based mostly in persistence, patience, and guts. You have to know the territory — if it looks like a great deal and IS a great deal, you have to know that, and you have to whip your card out, snap it down on the desk, and buy that damned thing before it evaporates into thin air. But one must not be too hasty, no, bourrum, otherwise you might miss out on the next roll of the dice that would have netted you a much bigger fish for far less dough.

It is similar yet not to buying computer hardware. You do your research, long and hard, and then make your purchase. Invariably, the hard drive/memory/monitor/printer will be cheaper and better the next day, and yours obsolete in the same time frame. Airline tickets are a similar phenomenon, except they might be more or less expensive any give day of the week — indeed, any given HOUR of the day — depending upon the whims of the airline and her cadre of spud-spanking scientists.

I try to be diligent, but this is wearing on me and will until I get everything bought. So much money, and so little time left. We have to be smart, smart, smart about it in order to have anything at all to travel on. I guess that’s where the research will, hopefully, pay off.