You know, I spent years living in Romania collecting experiences and anecdotes, I wrote hundreds of posts about this country, I quit my job to write a book about traveling and visiting Romania and in the last three weeks I’ve met tons of people to discuss this very subject, right down to giving a couple of hours of my life to do an interview with RL.

And yet all this time I’ve never once mentioned how to get here. I mean can you believe it? I mean sometimes you miss what’s right in front of you :))

The Woman and I are about to head to Spain before long and we had some bumps and turns and a couple of rescheduled flights and I realized once again, sheerly due to how my life turned out, I have a great deal of experience in traveling, especially flying.

I first flew on a plane when I was a tiny infant. And living all the places I did, I’ve flown hundreds if not thousands of times throughout my life. And I’ve had close family members work for airlines.

Not everybody has of course, so for those of you who might be curious about it, what follows is valid pretty much anywhere in the “modern” world. There are a few places in Africa and the like which are different but for just about anywhere you’re likely to go on your first trip, it’s the same worldwide.

Let me repeat that. Flying on commercial airliners is one of the most standardized industries on Earth. Everything is entirely in English and then maybe also in additional languages. Obviously if you’re reading this website you speak at least some English.

When I say it’s entirely in English I mean a Malev airplane flying from Budapest and filled entirely with only Hungarians, the pilots and cabin crew are still required to speak English (at certain times). Signs in every single airport worldwide are in English. And most importantly, all the good travel websites are in English as well.

The second thing to understand that’s very important is that the way seats on a plane are sold is one super insane complicated mess. If it was designed in Romania then every person here would be constantly grumbling and saying la noi ca la nimeni with a sour face.

When you ride a train or an inter-city bus, usually every seat has the same fare or cost. Some trains have two classes or occasionally more but the point is that an ordinary person can easily estimate the cost of buying a seat on that vehicle.

Every seat on a plane is sold at a different price. Just trust me on this. There are so many factors involved in determining which rate and what gets allotted where that it requires a supercomputer to understand.

What’s important to take away from this is that you can find vastly different fares for the exact same route or destination. I once flew from Romania directly to the United States (back when you could do that) for scandalously little money.

I want you to imagine if I met you at one of my book parties and we spoke and I said I’d pay you 100 euros to go to the library and do some research for me. How much research? Perhaps one or two hours. Would that be worth it to you? What if I paid you 500 euros or more?

What I’m trying to say is that you’re going to need to log in a few hours and do your research but it’s worth it because you’ll save a metric ton of money.

If you’re under 26 (or an adult teacher/professor), there’s an international card called ISTC. It isn’t overly useful here in Romania but one thing for sure it is useful for is getting cheap airplane tickets. They have their own separate system so check out their website if you’re eligible.

Step one therefore is budget a few hours of solid research time. Don’t try to do this at the last minute!

Step two is to understand that the last seat sold on an airplane is the most expensive and the first one is the cheapest. In other words, the more in advance you can buy a ticket, the better deals you’re going to get.

If you truly want to get cheap tickets, you need to buy them at least 30 days ahead of time. Anything less is basically going to be nearly worthless in terms of finding good prices.

Ninety days or more ahead of time is where you’re going to hit the jackpot. Nearly every seat on every plane is still unsold so you’ve got lots of options.

Another benefit to buying tickets ahead of time is that your schedule is a lot more flexible and so if you see a good price at a slightly different date, you still have time to re-arrange things.

The next thing is to decide your destination. Here’s a little secret – the more popular the destination, the cheaper the tickets are going to be. Once you think about it, it makes sense – with more people flying to a particular city, there’s going to be more competition to get their business.

For instance, the most popular destination with a lot of tourists near Cluj is Budapest, Hungary. If you were dead set on coming to Cluj and couldn’t find any good fares directly to here, you could look at Budapest since it’s relatively close by (Google Maps is your friend).

The secondary consideration here of course becomes transportation between the cheap city to fly to (Budapest, in this case) and the city where you really want to go (Cluj). I live here so I know there’s quick and quite affordable minibus service (plus a train) but it’s relatively easy to do even for a region you’ve never been to before in your life.

Even though I haven’t had the kindest words *coughcough* for the Romanian edition of the Lonely Planet guidebook, that organization does have a wonderful and informative discussion board called the Thorn Tree. It’s free to read and regular people all over the planet (including Yours Truly) log on there and help people with questions.

Likewise, depending on where you live, you may have several airports near your home and it may be cheaper to fly from one than the other. For instance, from Washington DC it’s about twice as cheap to fly to Dulles than National from Cluj (for a lot of complicated reasons). Or Philadelphia may be cheaper than New York, etcetera.

So let’s say you’re going to Venice, Italy. It’s a lovely town with millions of visitors every year so there’s hundreds of flights to choose from. You’re buying your ticket three months ahead of time so you’ve got lots of flexibility. You’re ready to do some serious research. Now what?

Now comes the part where you have to focus. There are several websites called “fare aggregators” which comb through some of the airlines’ prices and then you can compare and contrast them.

Since I’m not plugging anyone here for profit or whatever, I’ll only mention one – Kayak dot com. Mind you, it doesn’t work for all destinations but it is a powerful tool.

A friend of yours told you about a lovely dance festival held in Venice next April. You go to the website of the fare aggregator and type in your home city. Then you type in Venice Italy and a number of fares pop up.

First of course you have to look through each one and see if there are layovers or stops along the way. Those seem like “only a few hours” but they can make the trip incredibly exhausting. The further you’re traveling, the more tiring it’s going to be to make multiple stops.

Luckily however you live in a Major City so there’s lots of direct flights to Venice. You see prices X, Y and Z and they look good. Now what?

Now you do the same search over and over, varying the arrival/departure dates. Some fares have incredible differences if you arrive on X day and depart on Y day. Again, only some HAL-9000 computer deep in a basement under the Capitol Building can understand exactly how these things are priced. The point is you got to mess with dates and see if there’s any difference.

Once you’ve got your “good prices” and “good dates”, you go visit the other various fare aggregators and compare what they have to say.

Then what you have to do is remember the airline companies you saw with good prices and then go to their individual websites. In other words, if you saw on the aggregator websites that Alitalia had good fares, go check out their specific website (Alitalia dot com). Sometimes they have good fares posted on there that you can’t find anywhere else.

So you look on the fare aggregator sites, you’ve looked at the airlines’ own sites, know your “good dates” and feel fairly confident you’ve got some good deals. Well some people are ready to make the next step but I like to go down to visit a face to face travel agent. It’s like solid gold in your pocket to know the “good dates” because quite frankly they have a super complicated booking system to navigate and most of them aren’t good at it.

That being said, usually human travel agents are more expensive than online. But not always. One of the cheapest tickets I got in my life was from a face to face agent because I knew the “good dates”. Agencies have special agreements with airlines and sometimes it equates to a cheaper price for you.

Once you’ve done all of that, you’re ready for the next step – RESERVING the ticket. There is a huge difference between buying a ticket and reserving it.

Generally speaking, reserving a ticket is valid for about 24 hours and then you either have to buy it or else lose that guaranteed price and take your chance. I’ve found that if you reserve a ticket (but not buy it) and check back in a few hours, sometimes other deals pop up. If you find a better price, great. If not, you lost nothing and you can go ahead and buy the ticket you reserved.

Once it’s purchased however you’re going to have a devil of a time changing it, modifying it or canceling it and getting your money back. Therefore do your research with lots of time to look and see what’s out there. Often the plane ticket can be the most expensive part of the entire trip.

Bam, the ticket is purchased. In this day and age, you might not ever get any piece of paper that’s your “ticket”. At most you’ll get some kind of fancy receipt but all tickets are digital. All you need at the airport is simply your ID.

If your flight is short (2 hours or less), you may or may not get a full meal served to you. If it’s any longer, you almost certainly will. The next step is to log onto the airline’s website and contact them and request a special meal. I actually am weird about food but even in the days when I did eat hamburgers I always got the special meal (usually the “kosher” one).

Why? Well if you’re buying cheap tickets you’ll be sitting in the back of the plane with the herd. The airline is going to heat up about 500 trays of food all the same (or maybe you’ll get two choices) and then push the cart down the aisle. Who knows when you’ll get to eat or how warm it’ll be. Plus it’s the “generic” tray.

The special meals are always treated individually and almost invariably heated (if applicable) and served first. Sorry but a good meal is one of the highlights of flying.

Now you’re all set in terms of flying. I’ll leave aside other aspects (like hotel rooms and the like) because that’s frankly in the book and a lengthy subject I don’t feel like covering at the moment. Obviously look online to see the current security rules and how many milliliters of toothpaste you’re allowed and all that fun stuff.

But there is one more important thing to understand and since it just happened to us, I’ll definitely address it.

Not only is there a Cray supercomputer 500 meters underneath the Lincoln Monument determining all these crazy prices and fares but there’s also another super complicated system that schedules flights. And literally a typhoon in Japan can delay a plane from taking off in Argentina which backs up your Madrid flight that’s connecting to Dubai.

My point is things change all the time. You have legal rights as a passenger and it’s kind of important to know them. That information is easily found online but it’s part of the research time you need to dedicate to this because flying is always a fluid situation.

I think most people here remember the volcano situation in Britain earlier this year. That was rather drastic but delays and changes can happen all the time.

I wrote an entire post about ’em and I’ll repeat it here again – TAROM is pure flying chocolately goodness. They stopped me in Cluj last week when I flew to Bucharest to personally tell me they’d re-rerouted our Spain flight and left us unexpectedly having to spend 6 hours overnight in Bucharest. The Woman had a nice chat with them and bam, got a free hotel stay.

I’ve already confessed that I was shocked to find out that TAROM is still owned and operated by the Romanian government. I can’t speak to their financial savvy but I’ve never been on a friendlier and more helpful airline in my life. I wish I was getting paid to say that but I’m saying it for free, that’s how much I feel it.

If there’s one group of people who have been putting a good face on Romania for years and years, it’s the TAROM people and my hat is definitely off to ’em. I think I spent an hour in their office downtown last week and most of that was just chatting and talking.

Therefore beware some airlines. Do your research and find out people’s opinions of them. If you don’t know how to do that, go to Google and type “Airline X sucks” and you’ll quickly find out what people think. A super cheap ticket might be great if everything works out but if your suitcase gets lost or a snowstorm shuts down the airport, you might find out in a hurry how expensive it can get.

Now you know the basics of how to get a good deal on flying to an amazing place like Romania!