The right tool for this job?

[drwex]

Once upon a time rmd remarked that "the right tool for this job is your checkbook."

I am in the earliest stages of planning a possible family visit to the UK this summer. I have some constraints (duration, target locations, windows for travel) but a lot of flexibility. I want to optimize for price - the cheaper I can make the travel itself be the more I can spend on fun things to do while there.

I don't think any of the online sites I'm familiar with are optimized for this and I'm wondering if there's a site I don't know about or maybe it's time to employ a human travel agent. Although I am optimizing for price of travel my time also has value and I'd like not to spend a lot of hours poring over alternatives.

(Kayak seems to be the site closest to what I want but even that doesn't seem able to cope with "I want to travel around date X but if that's a bad season I can move to another month." Kayak lets me have a 2-3 date window in which I can run seemingly infinite numbers of searches on specific date combos.)

Comments

[mzrowan.livejournal.com]

Have you tried ITA's Matrix? Their "calendar of low fares" can do a date and up to a month later.

[donnad.livejournal.com]

I use cheaptickets.com, you give them dates and tell them to search within 3 days on either end and get you the best price. Right now the best we are finding for flights to London Heathrow for Worldcon is $1056. each. We were kind of hoping to find something under that $1K threshhold, but if we have to we'll grab those ones. They are bouncing us off Shannon on the way out and Dublin on the way back. Direct flights were about $200 more.
We already have our hotel reservation, so booking airfare has to take that into consideration. FWIW, we got a hotel about 1.5 miles from the convention center for only £55 a night. All the ones closer were in excess of £120. The hotel is supposed to be a 2 minute walk to the light rail which goes past the convention center.

[wotw]

This isn't directly responsive to your post, and you should of course feel free to ignore it, but if your itinerary is still wide open, here are a couple of things you might want to consider:

1) London is fabulous, but it's crazy to try to see it in a very short time. So unless you were going to spend several days there (which it's pretty clear you're not), I'd skip it altogether and save it for another trip.

2) Consider Wales. The Welsh countryside, and Welsh seacoast, is magnificent. Hay-on-Wye is enthralling and has the largest concentration of used bookstores in the world. The Gower Peninsula is magnificent, with many opportunities for hikes of all degrees of difficulty, all rewarded with stunning views. Hiking out to the end of Worm's Head (at Rhosilli) is one of the most awesome things you'll ever do. (And if you're a Dylan Thomas fan, it will be all the more meaningful.) There are forests, mountains, abbeys and castles galore. And Portmeirion is all a certain kind of geek could possibly hope for.

3) Hike the Cotswolds. There are several standard Cotswold walks, all of them beautiful, and all through countryside that is quinetessentially British, with all the thatched roofs and sheep and rolling hills you could hope for.

4) Bath rocks.

5) York rocks beyond all rocking. Like London, you shouldn't try to do it in a day, but you might be able to do a bunch of it in two or three. You can walk the perimeter of the city on the old medieval walls where the Yorkist's heads were displayed. You've got all those twisty narrow winding streets full of surprises to explore. There is activity everywhere --- amazing shopping, cafes, and, everywhere you look, the best street performers in the world.

6) In Scotland, the Trossachs are amazing. Loch Lomond is one of the most beautiful sights I've ever seen.

I have a gazillion more UK suggestions. Let me know if you want more.

[cos]

IMO, if you're being very picky about your schedule, then Hipmunk is the best these days, but if you're trying to optimize for price and have lots of flexibility, then Google Flight Search is the best these days. Kayak used to be my favorite until Hipmunk surpassed them in ease of setting constraints and visualizing the schedule, a couple of years ago. And then there's ITA Matrix, for when you want to geek out on flight search and look for weird things like open jaw trips with business class on one segment and economy on another, or when you want to tweak your itinerary to maximize your frequent flyer miles.

For your purposes, exploring possible travel dates and finding the best prices, it sounds like you should try Google Flight Search.