When you’ve done something a dozen times, you tend to forget that not everyone else has. It may seem simple enough to you, but a first-timer could still be at a loss. Since the engineer just booked the Helsinki-Goa tickets, he wanted to tell in details how he did it. So here it comes, a simple example on how to buy tickets, broken into smaller steps. Brought to you by the engineer, who, unlike usually, will be the “I” for the rest of this post. A lovely “I” if I may add ♥

“I looked into this for a couple of months before we had decided when to leave, just to get a general idea what the price range would be. I looked for flights departing around the end of November and beginning of December at Skyscanner and Google Flights. Lowest prices seemed to be around 320-350€ per person.

Once we decided when we want to leave, I noticed that the cheapest flights had a long total travel times or arriving in the middle the night. Fastest, and also most expensive flights lasted around 11 hours and cheapest ones from 26 hours to 33 hours with long layovers.

I started looking for alternatives. I knew from  my previous searches and travels that there are a bunch of cheap flights from Mumbai  to Goa. But when I checked flights to Mumbai and then other ones to Goa from there, I noticed they were more expensive or longer than those the booking sites had showed me. I also checked other airports near Goa, like Bengaluru and Kochi, but same thing there. There were no better options for us.

New Delhi has India’s busiest airport. I checked that one too and learned that we could get relatively cheap tickets (270€ at Skyscanner) from Aeroflot from Helsinki to Delhi with a connection in Moscow leaving just before noon. Waiting time at the airport would be about 4 hours, which is doable. We would arrive to Delhi 04:20. After that I looked for best ways to get from Delhi to to Goa. There is a whole lot of flights between the two cities, and Google Flights showed Air Vistara flight leaving at 09:00. There would be a comfortable amount of time to get our stuff from the baggage belt, go trough immigration and check in for the next flight. Google Flights  didn’t show the price, so after checking it at Air Vistara website, we learned that the prices were also the same as for the cheapest flights with worse flight times (67€/person). We will have check in luggage so this has to be added to the ticket prices, to get the true costs. We would then arrive to Goa just before noon.

This resulted in a little bit over 20 hours of flight time with a really good arrival time with the cheapest price I could find at the time. I also have wanted to flight Vistara after I saw this section on CNN business traveler on them.”

Anything missing? Would you like to know more details about how to find the best tickets to meet your needs? Do you have good ideas on how to save on transportation? Ask and tell us in the comment section.