Find out how to travel around the world at a low price

Origo.hu shares the story of a blogger, named Ákos, who hunts for extremely cheap flight tickets with which he travels around the world. If you are flexible and open-eyed, all you need is a small amount of money.

Ákos told origo that, for a while, he was rather afraid of flying, but he had always been fond of travelling and he once found the cheap promotional offers of Ryanair. Thus, he started looking for such opportunities, and he could travel to Barcelona for a cost of 11,980 HUF, and then to Forli for 4180 HUF, and he became passionate about getting cheap flight tickets. The name of his blog, where he shares his experiences, is Utazómajom (“Travel monkey”), for he loves monkeys and finds this name funny, bold and easy to remember. When he is not managing his traveling plans he works as a developer. Aside his job and other activities it takes a lot of his time and effort to seek inexpensive journeys and organize his travels.

He says, the breakthrough was his journey to America, because he could book return tickets to New York for only 8700 HUF, which is quite incredible. That was the first time he left Europe and realized that there are so many beautiful places he would like to visit, as cheaply as possible. You could be wondering how it is possible that flight tickets and accommodation are available for such low prices. So, according to him, one of the most common mistakes is that the prices are simply wrongly registered in the Global Distribution System (GDS): they miss a zero, the digits are falsely written, or the decimal points are placed badly. This is the greatest source of errors, as the registering is done by humans.

The other main reason is that sometimes, the systems cannot calculate the exact tariff nor do levy the fuel surcharges. These also result in rather attractive prices for the customers. For example, in the case of transatlantic tickets, 90% of the price is based on the fuel surcharge. Although, the blogger says there is no proper technique to find these error fares, he and others are constantly trying to find one. When one flight is found, they analyse it until the cause of the error is understood. Then they try to use the same schema for different routes, as the online travel agencies are browsed by many, so they must find an error sooner or later. Furthermore, they had written a programme: a scraper, which analyses the results of other users’ search.

As mentioned before, it is a rather time-consuming activity to seek for cheap tickets, but for Utazómajom it is worth it, as he could not have gone to such journeys if it was not for the low prices. Also, he gets quite happy and proud, when someone gets to travel at a good cost thanks to him. This can happen, because, when he finds a great offer, he shares that on his Facebook page, and thus, many people become aware of it and give him positive feedback later.