In the old days, if you wanted to purchase a ticket to London, Paris, Barcelona, Bangkok or Cairo, you had to actually pick up the phone and call the airline. This meant waiting on hold and listening to shitty music, which gifted you a moment of pause so you could think about whether or not you really wanted to drop that nonrefundable $1,500.
Or maybe you had your shit together so tight you would call up your travel agent. You made an appointment to sit down and plan the entire trip together, down to each meal and train ride and museum. Ultimately paying for the whole thing in one lump sum after days or weeks of responsible deliberation. Well, these days, all you have to do is go on CheapOAir.com, Expedia, Skyscanner or whatever airline site is your jam, and with just a few clicks you can book a flight across the world. Booking travel online is a thrilling act, especially when performed impulsively. I have a fine record of making life-changing decisions and purchases—like breaking up with a boyfriend or giving notice on my apartment lease or signing a five-year lease on a brand-new VW Beetle that I couldn’t afford—on impulse.
Now I believe travel is one of the best things you can do for yourself, period. And I think my recent excursions to Spain, Armenia, France and Hungary were enriching and life-changing uses of my hard-earned cash—trips I don’t regret. Still, after booking about twenty flights on CheapOAir.com, (which is so easy to do with my debit card and billing address saved in my account) I started feeling a bit addicted. I’d wake up in the morning, already in some other country, say, England, and I’d be like “A trip to Paris on Ryanair is just $110 if I leave tomorrow morning! Screw the Chunnel, let’s go!”
I’d click “Purchase”, and I’d get the prompt “Don’t refresh your browser, we’re processing your booking,” and I’d get a nice big high. My fingers tingled, my heart rate spiked, I got all sweaty—it was awesome. I also did this while staying in Granada, Spain for a month, because despite being in one of the most lovely places on the planet, I got bored and depressed, mainly because I had no friends. My favorite pick-me-up—binge-watching Curb Your Enthusiasm on Amazon Prime Instant Video or Homeland on Showtime—was not possible due to georestrictions. These streaming services are not available outside of the US. I tried to break in anyway using a VPN or virtual private network, but they kept blocking me.
So when I got depressed and bored in Granada, I just logged onto CheapOAir with really no specific destination in mind. I told myself I was “just browsing,” the way I’d browse through an overpriced boutique in Santa Monica on the off chance I might find a $400 dress marked down to $20. (Yes, I’ve scored these deals, but usually the dress has a major snag or a minor stain or is missing the matching slip.) I started typing in random destinations to see what deals I could find.
“Maybe I can go to Berlin?” I muttered to myself. “How expensive could that be?” Well, given I was looking to hightail it out of the city in the next few days, I found it was quite expensive to take a trip to Berlin, something like $600. Bear in mind my concept of mileage within Europe is out of whack, and this is probably a testament to my Americanness—we’re geographically brain-dead. On a map, the countries look all smashed up together, so it’s easy to think it would only take 30 minutes to hop from Granada to Berlin. In actuality, it’s a three-hour journey.
Berlin may not have worked out, but that didn’t stop me. I just started typing all sorts of European cities into the fare calculator, regardless of whether I actually wanted to visit them.
Copenhagen? $500.
Oslo? $600
Athens? $700
Paris (even though I’d just been there a month earlier and it’d recently been attacked by terrorists)? $400
Istanbul? $450
Prague? $500
Amsterdam? $650
Then I typed in Budapest, and when I typed it in I really crossed my fingers. My father’s side is Hungarian, although the family has been in Los Angeles for four generations. But he’d never been to the mother country and neither had I, so I really truly wanted to visit and connect with my Magyar roots.
I waited.
It took a few minutes for the site to bring up the various rates, and, sure enough, I found a kickass deal. $220 to Budapest from Madrid, roundtrip, two stops, short layovers. In about three minutes I had my ticket. With CheapOAir, it’s as fast, painless, and as dangerous as purchasing stuff on Amazon Prime. Sure, $220 is a real deal, but then I had to book an AirBnb, which wasn’t much of an addiction until they unleashed their “Instant Book!” option. Luckily, I was able to score a bitchin’ pad in the heart of downtown for $19 a night.
I scored that deal because I decided to go to Budapest in the dead of February, when no one was booking on Airbnb. Though I did freeze my ass off while walking up the Danube River at night to see the gorgeousness of an illuminated Hungarian Parliament, I also got to ice skate at Europe’s largest outdoor rink, which stood beside a castle, so it was worth it in the end.
Of course, it’s not just the flight and the lodging that costs money when you travel. There are cab rides and hop-on-hop-off buses, there are dinners out and emergency purchases, which, for me, included buying my psych meds over the counter because I didn’t have enough. And, of course, entrances to things like Parliament and the ice skating rink and the castle cost money. But this wasn’t the worst of it.
I booked my flight to Budapest out of Madrid, thinking I could catch a cheapo bus ride up from Granada to the Madrid airport for 20 euros or something. Unfortunately, no such bus existed at the times I needed. This meant I had to book another flight from Granada to Madrid. For whatever reason these 45 minute flights are exceptionally expensive—$226 actually, for a round-trip.
My “super cheap” trip to Budapest immediately cost double what I’d planned, and it got even worse when I got suckered into having a “private cab” drive me to my Airbnb from the airport. This massive Hungarian man, about mid-twenties who resembled my 6’3″ father, led me to a huge Mercedes and charged me 25,000 forints, which equals 80 US dollars. Sure, he got me home fast, but the ride back to the airport cost me about 5,000 forints, or $15.
At one point, I became aware of my addiction to CheapOAir, and also Airbnb and even Booking.com (where you can find super sweet deals on luxury hotels if you shop around for an hour or so). This meant that when I was feeling down and isolated in Yerevan, Armenia, I did not book the flight to Dubai, UAE. Even though I could have gotten a ticket for something like $120.
By that time, it became clear to me that my way of escaping was, well, to run for the border of whatever country I was in at the time. Knowing this, I accepted that it was a shit way to try to make myself feel better. I had also wised enough to consider that since Dubai is such a posh city, rides and hotels and all of that might cost me a pretty penny.
I’ve stayed off CheapOAir since, and plan to take a six-month or yearlong break.
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