Guest post by Andrew Smith (Kathleen's husband)
Today is Saturday, April 21, 2018. I’m going to walk through how I would plan a trip to Ireland in the next few months. I’ve had people ask about cost and method, so I thought the easiest way to do this would be walk through it.
Some assumptions:
- Flexible Schedule
- You can drive manual (stick shift) car
- 7-11 days of time
- Live within a few hours of the New York City area
Airfare
My go to tool for airfare is Google Flights. If you can be flexible with your dates you are going to save the most money. However, I always purchase through the actual airline, not through Google or Expedia or a similar service. I’m going to use Google Flights to find the best price. Then I will check a few discount airlines to compare, and then check the actual airline Google Flights recommends on their website.
First, let’s use Google Flights to find some good dates. I specify New York City as the departure location and Dublin (and possibly Shannon) as the destination.
Then I click the calendar to try and find a good date/price range. When looking at the calendar you will get an idea of the prices and can browse through the months to see where the best price is.
There are some low prices shown, but this includes some discount airlines with some gimmicks you may not want. For instance, WOW Airline has a great price– $350 round trip. However, note the stopover in Iceland for a day. They charge little so they encourage you to spend a day touring Iceland. If you are up for this, give it a shot.
WOW being a discount airline also will charge for meals, luggage and seat selection.
I’m going to ignore WOW.You can eliminate WOW from your search on Google flights if you like. I’ll check some discount airlines later on. I’d rather fly a mainline airline like Delta, but Aer Lingus has some great prices.
This is for Monday April 30 – Wednesday May 9th. Aer Lingus is also a type of discount carrier, so I went ahead to the Aer Lingus website and used the same dates but selected the fair that included luggage, meals and a seat selection. At this point it is at $424 round trip per person. That’s pretty good!
I really like Delta so a final check I make is for the same dates at the Delta website. Unfortunately I’m so close to those dates that I get no good price with Delta. I used their flexible grid search and went out to late June — I did see some good prices there.
Delta for $516 isn’t bad, and if you sign up for some of their promotions/credit card deals you can save another $100 or so usually. (Depending on promotion) — so for two people you are getting round trip for about $50 more than Aer Lingus.
Another tip, go to the Aer Lingus website and check out their prices from Hartford airport (BDL)– For me it’s closer than New York City. I actually found it for $424 from Bradley on Aer Lingus.
As a final step I want to see if Norwegian Air out of Newburgh can do cheaper than $424 for a comparable fair. Turns out in this case I can get a better deal:
So we will fly out of Newburgh (Stewart Airport) for $369 per person.
Here is my itinerary so far:
Mon April 30 – Wed May 9 — $738 ($369 each) for 2 People from Newburgh, NY to Dublin via Norwegian Air.
Renting a Car
Next, let’s talk about transportation. I love using Expedia for this.
A small car is nice in Ireland. So I’ll take the first one I see.
That is $139 for 8 days of a car. You can’t get a much better deal than that.
Be warned they are going to want to charge you a lot of extra for insurance when you get there– and only certain credit cards will work in Ireland for car insurance. That’s a whole other topic. But before you go make sure you can use your credit card for insurance. (The Amazon Prime Visa does this, but you have to get a letter from them before you leave in order to make sure you don’t get charged extra by the rental agency).
An Automatic Transmission is going to double that cost of a car rental.
Hotel/Air BnB
I’ll use AirBnb for the housing. Somewhere near Dublin would be nice.
Let’s go with the $66 a night one.
When booking on AirBnB read all the reviews before you book. This will give you a great idea of what you are getting into.
8 nights, let’s call it $600. Of course in reality you probably want to pick two or three different places across the country to spread out your trip.
Final Budget
So here is my final budget:
Airfaire: $738 Car: $139 House: $600
That’s $1,477 to get you there and let you stay. Now it’s a question of what you want to do and eat. If you want to you could get by for another $500 for the entire time…. we will write another time about how we eat ‘on a budget’ and different tips for things to see in Ireland.
There are some extra fees, like airport parking if you can’t get a ride– for Newburgh Stewart Airport this could be $50 – $90 total.
Upcoming Blog Topics:
- Ireland: Breakfast on the Go
- Getting Around Dublin
- Preparation for an Ireland Trip
- AirBnB tips for Ireland
- Free and Discounted Sites to see in Ireland