Fly to Europe for less than $200?!

For many people who love to travel I’m sure Europe is high on their bucket list (I know it’s high on mine), but traveling around the world seems almost out of reach. Doing a quick search on your favorite airline or a travel aggregate site like Kayak shows you that you need anywhere from $1,000-$2,000 to fly to Europe! On top of spending about $1,500 on your flight there you still have to pay for somewhere to stay, food and all the attractions you want to visit. With all that adding up to lots of $$ it almost seems impossible.

Well Dani and I are traveling to Europe and we don’t have lots of $$ to spend on just our flight there. Plus with the two of us we are looking at $$$$ (as in double) so I did a lot of research. Everyone knows that Flying in the summer months is going to be expensive, so I looked at Spring and Fall. I also looked at different airports and trying to make a combination of flights to make it cheaper. It helped a little. I looked at flying in the middle of the week instead of weekends. Got a little cheaper. Then I found Norwegian Air! With Norwegian and all the other tricks I learned about I found how to get inexpensive flights to Europe!

Traveling with Norwegian Air

Side note this takes a little more planning, but in the long run you can save a lot of dough. We ended up Buying tickets from LA to Copenhagen for $194.50 each! Flights from SLC to LA are about $80 each. Copenhagen to Paris… $56. So a grand total of $330.50 to Paris! Of course that is one way, but the way back should be fairly similar so you are looking at anywhere from $650-$700 RT!

So whats the catch? Well there are a few “catches” but not anything that should be a deal breaker for an amazing trip to Europe. So there are a few things that can make the flight more expensive, and if you can live with out them than you have yourself a great deal. Here is where they add additional fees:

Handbag Only

• 1 bag, max 10 kg(22lbs) with a max dimensions of 55x40x23cm (21.65×15.75x9in) So about a 35-40 liter backpack.
• Check on bags are $42 with a max of 20kg(44lbs)

Meal

• To add a meal to your flight, its about $42

Seat

• To select the seat you want, its about $42 as well

You can add a package deal as you buy the ticket for the meal and seat for about $56 and save some money. But you still have to pay for the baggage separate. Don’t forget that this is per flight. So you have to purchase all of these on your return flight.

So what did we do? Nothing. We added none of the 3 items and kept our flight cheap. You can take your own food and we can live out of one bag each. It would be nice to sit by each other but we will probably sleep most of the way since its a night flight. Doing that saves us $84 each in just our seats!

Norwegian’s cheapest flights go to Scandinavian countries. From there you can get cheap flights to other European destinations.

Tips

Buy in NOK
If you check out in USD you will be charged a little more. We found out that if you pay for the ticket in NOK its cheaper. At the top right there is a Currency selector. We just selected NOK and paid with a credit card that doesn’t have conversion fees and saved some more money!

Low fare flight calendar
Norwegian has a low fare flight calendar you can use to see when its cheapest to fly. You can select where you want to depart from and it will show you locations and the cheapest flight per month. It’s super handy if you have a flexible schedule.

Different Airports
Make sure you check out which airport is the cheapest flight. Norwegian flies out of 5 US airports. Depending on where you live and where you can get a cheap flight to it might be good to try the different US airports. So far they have 2 in Florida, 2 in California and 1 in New York.

Newsletter
Norwegian has a newsletter you can sign up to that sends out deals. A good way to know when there are some deals.

Alternatives

There are other alternative discount airlines out there. Another one I found in my research is Wow Air. Its based out of Iceland and has flights from Boston and DC to Europe. I have seen one way tickets from DC to the Copenhagen for under $200. This is a good option for those that are on the east coast.

I am sure there are others that I may not know of and I have heard rumors of others that want to start up.

Do you know of another good solution to fly to Europe on a budget? Let us know!