Never try to book tickets during any holidays

I had an amazing experience recently, can even consider it frustrating, but the encounter can certainly worth another bookmark on my travel life.

Oct 1^st till Oct 10^th is the china National holiday an important holidays in China. This is also the last “long” holiday until Spring Festival, otherwise known as Chinese New Year. During this extended holidays the affluent travel to distance land to spend their holidays. Although it will never reach the same level of mass migration like the New Year, but it is like open season for money grabbing, it certainly got me frustrated and angry.

I thought having a 10-day holiday, perhaps is a good week to get away from my work to go to Hong Kong to visit my family there. Great idea isn’t it? My families were all excited for my pending visit. That was until I started looking into booking tickets.

Far from being a procrastinator, I started looking for tickets in mid July for early Oct. departure. I thought the ticket price were high when I start my search. I thought perhaps I should look a little harder explore all the options. At least that is what I usually do my search. I started the fare watching, every time I got an alert. It is almost always the flights already sold out. The schedule I prefer either unavailable, or I got one flight and the return flight is either leaving in the middle of the night, or on the next day other than the date I prefer. It got worst, as day passes. The price kept going up rather than down. With those mid night departure and arrival, I may as well book the FedX cargo flights.

After two weeks of searching, with the same result, my patient was at the breaking point. Time to change strategy. I decided to try looking at alternative days on leaving a week later after the National Holidays. I was shock to found that not only the price drop two-third from the peak week, all flights were also available.

Flight availability is understandable at non-peak, but price is two-third less is unthinkable. I travel during Thanksgiving or Christmas holidays before, flights will always available if I book months in advance, plus I believe airlines added flight to accommodates travelers. In China I can’t believe that is the case, all airlines from domestic to foreign were solidly booked. What amazes me is the legal price fixing across the board. For the government that control everything, which they turn a blind eye on the situation. But then it is China. Not everything happened for a reason.

This experience is certainly an eye opener to me. I travel frequently during high season, but I had never experience anything like this in my entirely life. There were other interesting facts I found out during my search for economic flights. I can book a flight to Thailand with an extended stay in HK during the same period, for half the price fly direct to Hong Kong. That is insane, because Thailand is a lot further than going to HK alone. Does that make any sense for you? If I have the time I would took that option. Unfortunately time is not an option for some of us here.

There you have it, just when I thought I explored almost everything here in the mainland. I encountered another surprise.

Chang Encounter Shanghai.