How I screwed up going to Reykjavik and Oslo

This trip marked my third time going to Iceland. A while ago a couple friends and I went to Alaska to see the Northern Lights but cloud cover vexed our trip. This time, we decided to jump on a deal from Icelandair to do a layover in Reykjavik on the way to Oslo, Norway. The hope was to see the Northern Lights in either of the two places. We were excited to go and I plotted out getting tickets for us. I made some mistakes when planning, but we did get to go anyway. I learned from them and hope you can too.

We talked about going to see the Northern Lights for a while. A deal from Icelandair popped up for November for inexpensive flights to Europe with layovers in Iceland. My friend and I discussed it and decided to try to go anew and to plan the trip to use the Europe spot as a back up. That is how we came to Reykjavik and Oslo. I scored us tickets for around $525 round trip but needed to pick a place to fly out of since neither Austin (where I live) or San Antonio (where my friend lives) has flights for Icelandair.

Previously, I had done this sort of trip to Dublin and we flew out of Denver since it is hella cheap to get to from Austin and we had people to overnight with before our flight out. This led to the mistakes.

Mistake Number One: Booking two sets of tickets at different times

Using the previous experience with Denver, I opted to fly out of Denver again. I got the Icelandair tickets and then started to look at tickets for Denver a week or so later. That was the first mistake. I should have bought the Denver tickets along with the Iceland tickets or in the twenty four hour grace period to return the tickets. Booking everything at once was the way to do this and something I would do in the future for a trip like this.

I wouldn’t necessarily do it if I were going to do something like try to see Machu Pichu out of Lima and were going to get a flight there and back while in Lima. However, if I were to jump on a cheap flight to Asia out of Los Angeles or San Francisco, I’d book the trip there from Austin at the same time as the flight to Asia.

By waiting on booking the second set of tickets, I shut the door on being able to pivot once I realized that I had erred in my plan for tickets.

Mistake Number Two: Domestic Travel over Thanksgiving

We opted for going Thanksgiving week since it’s three days of paid time off for each of us and most people fly domestic for that time period. The “most people fly domestic for that time period” is exactly how I made this mistake. We were flying to a city that Icelandair flies out of and that means flying domestic somewhere since it is too far to drive to.

Simply put, I should not have tried to fly out of a city that isn’t driveable over Thanksgiving week. Last year, I went to England and drove to Houston to fly out for pretty cheap on a direct to London flight with friends based out of Houston. It was inexpensive and easy. This was not quite the same experience.

By the time I looked at Denver tickets, prices were high because of Thanksgiving travel. Again, mistake number one was not buying them when I bought the first set of tickets. I hadn’t even thought about the fact it was the week of Thanksgiving and prices would be inflated. I was use to cheap tickets on Southwest to Denver and usually go a couple times a year and expected it to be the same. It was not.

I did spend a couple weeks looking for a deal. Expectedly, I found none. I pulled the trigger on a flight from Austin to Denver that ran around the same price as the ticket to Iceland had. That is money left on the table.

We would have had just as much fun going a few weeks earlier when we weren’t paying the Thanksgiving mark up or had we gone after the new year. Getting direct flights to Europe for this week would have been cheaper. I had an extra couple of days of time off that I could have leveraged for this trip to cover the whole week. Instead, I got caught up in a three days of time off for the trip and the previous experience.

Mistake Number Three: Going West to go East

I love Denver. I love my homies that live in Denver. However, we should have gone east to fly east and not back tracked two hours to go to Denver and then seven hours to Reykjavik. Icelandair flies out of Boston and Baltimore and other cities east of Austin. Instead of going to Denver, we should have gone to one of them. Had I not been too excited about the trip, I might have realized this and fixed it. The flights were going to run about the same going East as going to Denver and I should have booked that way.

Unlike my last trip with the Icelandair stop over, we didn’t need to catch an early flight out and did not need to have a place to crash before our flight. We’d picked Denver previously to see a few friends there and because we got tickets from Southwest for around $200 a piece. This time, we could have picked Boston, where the third person in our group flew out of. Or we could have just found the city with the cheapest flight domestically and made it work.

In doing so, we could have gone east and cut down on travel time. Coming back Sunday and needing to go to work on Monday after a three flight trip (Oslo to Reykjavik to Denver to Austin) could have been way easier had we cut out the extra time going to and from Denver. Selecting Denver was out of the way and negatively impacted the flight times.

Overall Thoughts

I enjoyed this trip. I would have booked it differently. It is absolutely a mistake I will not make again, but I am happy to have gone on the trip. I blundered three times.

I didn’t buy both sets of tickets at once. It meant being stuck with the Icelandair tickets while having to buy domestic tickets too or losing the Icelandair tickets.

I opted into domestic travel over Thanksgiving. I could have planned better for a trip where we have to fly to get to the deal we were taking. That was dumb. This is an awful time to travel domestically. Not so much internationally, but across the U.S. for sure.

Finally, we went West to go East and added on time for our flights. It was unneeded and there were alternatives. It wasn’t part of the deal we were flying, it was just a waste of time.

Despite these mistakes, I had fun. I’ll post about both Reykjavik and Iceland in another post. I’ll do the same for Oslo as well. I do hope my folly can help someone else not make the same mistake in the future.