Complex multi-city (and continent) travel: do I need a travel agent?

December 19, 2015 3:41 AM

Through a combination of work opportunities and family obligations, I have some really complex travel planned for next April. I am starting and ending in Stockholm, but will be in Asia, the US, and Central Europe in the middle -- in that order. My attempts to price tickets myself (on Expedia and similar sites) with the multi-city travel options have landed me prices in the $3k range, which seems pretty absurd (and also isn't even offering me good flight times/layovers). Will I have better luck with a travel agency? I've always booked all my own travel before.

Travel details as follows:

Stockholm Arlanda (Sweden) --> Yerevan (Armenia), eleven days in Armenia --> New York City (USA), six days in New York --> Munich (Germany), two days in Germany --> Stockholm.

I'd book everything through the travel agency my employer works with, but the NYC leg is personal, not business.

posted by byzantienne to Travel & Transportation (15 answers total)

Will your work pay for anything booked through them? What are their rules for reimbursement if you don't book through them?
posted by the agents of KAOS at 3:45 AM on December 19, 2015

Response by poster: Complicated: I work for a university and some of this trip (Munich) they will absolutely pay for, as they're sending me to a conference; some is research (Armenia), which there is a budget for but has SEPARATE reimbursement rules.

It'd be a lot easier if I didn't need to be in the States in the middle on a trip that I cannot in any way justify being work-related.
posted by byzantienne at 3:51 AM on December 19, 2015

Yes, do speak to a travel agent. They know all the fare rules and can work out the best options with stopovers etc. I book online if I'm doing something simple but travel agents are still very helpful for the messier trips. It shouldn't cost you any extra- they make their money from the airlines - and will probably save you quite a bit.
posted by kitten magic at 3:59 AM on December 19, 2015

I'd think of it as Sweden > Armenia > Germany > Sweden with a longer stopover in Munich so that you can take a separate side trip to the US. You should be able to get a good deal on a Munich-NYC round trip.
posted by TWinbrook8 at 3:59 AM on December 19, 2015 [6 favorites]

Kayak.co.uk has worked well for me recently.
posted by Jacqulyn at 4:00 AM on December 19, 2015 [1 favorite]

just an anecdote, but my partner (who works for a university and arranges her own travel) has a similar trip (about 20 flights, i think) earlier this year. she arrived at crete airport, somewhere in the middle of all this, to find that she had accidentally booked the flight out for the next month. which was expensive to fix (all flights that day were fully booked etc etc). so i think at some point there's an argument that there's a level of complexity beyond which it's better to pay someone else to give it the focus it deserves...
posted by andrewcooke at 4:04 AM on December 19, 2015 [3 favorites]

Bookend as much as you can with round trip flights. Airlines ding you hard for one way travel, especially internationally. (For instance, a round trip between Chicago and London is actually usually less expensive than just the leg to London alone.)
posted by phunniemee at 4:07 AM on December 19, 2015

For what it's worth, I book international travel all the time as part of my job, and $3000 for all those flights seems like an incredibly good deal to me.
posted by something something at 4:59 AM on December 19, 2015 [19 favorites]

How about a combination of flying and train. All flights are round trip on Austrian Airlines between Stockholm and Vienna, Vienna and Yervan, Vienna and NYC. Munich is 4 hours from Vienna by train.

Other combinations are probably possible using Munich instead of Vienna, but I flew Austrian Air 2 months ago and remembered they had non-stop to Yervan.
posted by Homer42 at 5:01 AM on December 19, 2015

If it's possible, adding another city might make it cheaper. For example, you can get very cheap flights from Oslo or Stockholm to NYC on Norwegian Air (maybe $400-500 RT). Then you could do RT Stockholm to Armenia, RT Stockholm to NYC, RT Stockholm to Munich.
posted by three_red_balloons at 7:44 AM on December 19, 2015 [1 favorite]

P.S. Also, doing it that way seems like it would make it easier to charge separate accounts correctly.
posted by three_red_balloons at 7:46 AM on December 19, 2015

I came here to suggest something similar to three_red_balloons

Big trip bracketing the whole shebang:

Stockholm <> Munich
charged to conference budget, book this for the very beginning and very end of your trip

Little trips within that:

Munich <> Yerevan
charged to your research budget, book for the beginning of your trip, making sure you depart after your previous flight arrives from Stockholm and returning to Munich when you want to go to NYC

Munich <> NYC
Pay from personal funds, book to depart after your previous flight arrives from Yerevan and returning to Munich for your conference)

The main issue will be the days when you are arriving from one "trip" and departing on another one on the same day. You'll need to make sure to leave enough buffer time at the airport to get your luggage and check it back into your next flight, as each "round trip" will be a separate itinerary.

Making Munich the hub of all this has some potential downsides: if your flights don't line up right, you might have to overnight which could be expensive. Flights from Munich might not be cheap (I think the competition from Norwegian is pushing down prices for Scandinavia-originating flights), and from what I can tell, there are no Munich-Yerevan direct flights which will make for really long days.
posted by polexa at 7:58 AM on December 19, 2015

A travel agent comes in handy when stuff happens during your trip. Which it will.
posted by DanSachs at 8:55 AM on December 19, 2015

I did a complex trip recently and wished I'd worked with a travel agent. I ended up costing myself a couple hundred dollars when I got confused about time zones. Tell them the price you worked out for yourself and see what they say.
posted by mishaps at 3:25 PM on December 19, 2015

I did a 7 country, 7 week trip starting in Australia, and spanning several cities in North & South America, Europe, and Asia. I usually book all my own travel, but in this case, I used a travel agent.

We ended up with a great fare on a round the world ticket, which I wouldn't have understood the fare rules for without the agent. In Peru, we got bumped from a flight that was cancelled, and put on a different flight. This caused mayhem through the rest of the airports we went through, as it altered a segment of our round the world ticket because one airline staff member didn't put in the change properly.

On our final leg coming back to Australia, the Charles de Gaulle airport staff flat out wouldn't let us travel on that ticket, insisting that we had somehow messed it all up. I've never been more happy to have a travel agent sort that all out for us, and it took a bit of time and phone calls back and forth - but we managed to get on the flight with 5 minutes till the doors shut.

Get a travel agent!
posted by shazzam! at 7:57 PM on December 19, 2015