Are Those Last Minute Deals for Real?

So last week was the end of a 6 month freelance gig and I had decided to take a couple weeks off. It got me thinking. Are those last minute travel deals I get emails about every week for real? Can you really book a trip to Europe for $500? I decided to find out. I’d take advantage of one of the last minute packages. Where would it lead me? Maybe London for a few days. Cost Rica perhaps?

My friend Bruce and I couldn’t wait for the email alerts to start rolling in. Turns out there was one flaw in the plan--this little thing called Spring Break! The usual emails didn’t arrive. But it was too late, we had caught the bug. We were ready to travel. We hopped online and started the search. We searched and we searched and we searched. The world was our oyster. We crossed London off the list pretty quickly. We crossed most of Europe of the list. There just were no deals. We were close to choosing Costa Rica when Bruce threw out China as an option. China? Can you imagine a hillbilly in China? I’ve always wanted to go, but could we really get a last minute deal to China? I mean Asia is not even one of the options on the last minute deals links on most websites. We both started searching. On Easter Sunday we found our deal. We had found a great airfare. We could leave on Thursday! We mapped out our flights (4 one-way legs), got the credit cards out, input all our info and hit “confirm purchase.” Instead of a confirmation, we got kicked back to the home page. We tried again and got the same result. We finally got a hold of someone at the website to help us. Alas, he couldn’t get the purchase to go through either. Something was apparently wrong with one of the airlines websites.

To make a long story short, well at least shorter, we finally got the airfare booked Monday around 2pm. We rushed down to the Chinese Consulate; yes you need a visa to visit China, before it closed at 3pm. We got there at like 2:45, picked a number #385 (they were on #316) and wondered if we’d even get called. Had we just booked airfare for a trip we wouldn’t be able to take due to lack of a visa?! They closed the doors promptly at 3pm, but continued to help everyone that already had a number.

After what seemed like hours, it was finally our turn. We got to the window, turned in our passports and visa paperwork and politely asked if there was anyway we could get them tomorrow? We were handed a receipt and told, “You can pick them up anytime after 9am tomorrow.” We did have to pay $20 to expedite the visa, but that certainly seemed reasonable to us. We were getting close to actually making this trip happen.

We picked up our passports, with visas this morning. We had our plane tickets. We just needed to make some tweaks to the hotel reservations. We’re off to the airport tomorrow night. Have we actually pulled off a last minute trip to Asia?

Stay tuned…