If planning a trip to Thailand you’ll see the phrase “cheap flights to Thailand” everywhere you look. They aren’t cheap as they are laden with hidden costs and extensive flight time.

The best bet if flying from America, Canada or Britain is to book the flight yourself with the intended airlines you’ll be using.

Sites such as Travelocity, Orbitz and Kayak will show you a good fare but then they add in the other costs such as service fee’s. You will pay a surcharge for using their site which will add $20 to $40 a ticket. Then they will tell you you can’t use an E ticket which means you must purchase a paper ticket. There will be a processing fee for the paper ticket as well as a $20 fee to have it mailed to you.

My brother and I purchased our tickets for our up coming trip in January yesterday. Since we live in Baltimore there are no direct flights so we have to get a flight to New York and from there a flight to Thailand. I normally use Delta airlines and Thai air respectively. So yesterday we decided to check all the different offers from Travelocity, Orbitz, Kayak, Cheap Flights and on and on.

They showed all the different flights but the Delta/Thai air combination flight was always the cheapest at a little over $1430.00 all in. There were a couple of flights cheaper by $100 or so but they required multiple layovers and were anywhere from 31-52 hours from takeoff to destination.

Unfortunately after you enter in all your information these so called cheap flights offered start to become more expensive. Travelocity averaged about $50.00 per ticket with Orbitz following in a close second. The other sites showed the cheapest flights being much higher by disregarding the Delta/Thai air option for the more expensive American Airways option which was over $1000 more per ticket. Travelocity came out with the cheapest price per ticket of all the sites, but their ticket for $1430.00 ended up being $1483.00 in reality.

Buying our tickets directly from Delta and Thai air got us the lowest price. The Delta flight round trip to New York From Baltimore was $178.00 and the Thai Air flight round trip from New York to Bangkok was $1253.00 for a combined price of $1431.00 per ticket including taxes.

The flight to New York is a little over an hour and the flight to Bangkok from New York is 17 hours. The layover in New York is roughly 3 hours. As I said earlier there are many flights that have multiple layovers and stops which might cost you less if you go through the airline direct but time is money and they are stealing your time from a much needed vacation. Seventeen hours is a long flight straight to Bangkok…I couldn’t imagine flying any longer than that.

Whatever airline you use and whatever flight you decide on book it directly through the airline itself as this will be the cheapest flight even when you have to book multiple flights to get where you are going.

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