Saturday, April 30, 2011

Air Fare To and From Egypt

Air Fare To and From Egypt


For many, the most expensive part of a budget holiday to Egypt will be airfare. Those from Europe will pay much less, perhaps below half as much for air fare as North Americans. For example, using a normal discount booking service checking fares from London to Cairo and from New York to Cairo (using travelocity.com for departure dates in mid September), the London round trip ticket to Cairo would cost just over $500 US, while the New York ticket to Cairo would have cost almost $900.00. (I should note that these rates have not significantly changed for several years) Using a regular local travel agency would probably result in tickets costing as much as several hundred dollars more for each.

However, off-line services, particularly in Europe, may yield better deals then on-line air reservation systems. This is probably due to the somewhat smaller charter services, some of which are becoming scheduled flight providers.

To obtain the very least expensive airfare to Egypt one must usually go beyond the Internet, and depending on the time, effort and long distance calls required, it may not be worth it to everyone. One is really only likely to improve their ticket pricing using true air consolidators, bucket shops or charter services but these companies rarely quote on-line fares. Further, Internet searches for air consolidators will mostly yield companies claiming such, but with fares no different, or even higher then the normal on-line discount air booking companies. Others will have cheap fares to specific destinations, but not Egypt.

Those people looking hard for discount airfare are likely to become frustrated. Most on-line discount services require a registration process, only to yield no different ticket pricing then all the others. There is a good reason for this, as most on-line services must use published rates. We would highly advise people searching out the lowest possible ticket pricing to read the FAQ on cheap airfares, consolidators and bucket shops at http://www.travel-library.com/air-travel/consolidators.html. This is an excellent reference particularly on international air fare.

In general, we have found that the earlier one books a flight to Egypt, the better the fare will be (in many cases, but there are exceptions). One example of on-line air discount services which appear to yield good results is Travel Secrets at http://travelsecrets.com/. There, we find rates from New York for about $705 USD. They show no fairs, however, from the UK. For UK flights, check with airfares.co.uk. There, we found flights to Egypt from London for 295 USD plus taxes. Several others with good fares from London included FlightSearch and Lastminute.com.

In Germany, Air Berlin is a good bet. They service twelve countries, with departures from a number of different cities in Germany.

Many of the best airfares from specific countries can be found from on-line systems specific to those countries, rather than the large international booking systems, and it would be very difficult for us to name specific systems for each country. Hence, one must explore.

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