Travel Fail: Wedding Edition

Wedding Wire tells me that there are 143 days left until our wedding.

That’s fine. I’m not stressed. We intentionally gave ourselves lots of time to plan this thing, so nothing feels rushed.

There is one thing that has greatly disappointed me, however. Jared and I, the key players in this whole wedding, have somehow dropped the ball on booking our flights.

We got this, we thought. We’ve been playing the airline ticket game for years. YEARS. We know how it works. Don’t buy too early – you can lock yourself in and risk seeing prices plummet. Don’t buy too late – flights are notoriously expensive at the last minute.

We’ll wait for the sweet spot, we thought. Somewhere between 6 months and 3 months out from the wedding. We have a mildly complicated requirement, as Jared’s flying to Vegas for his buck show, then meeting me in Hawaii the week before the wedding, then we’re both intending to fly home together post-honeymoon. (Please keep your Hangover-waiting-to-happen jokes to yourselves, thanks.)

There was an inkling of doubt in January, when direct flights to Honolulu hovered around $1200.

Not yet, we thought, they’ll go down. And we waited. We waited while some of our guests bought their flights. We waited while the prices fluctuated a little bit. And then we suspected that we might have made a mistake.

THE PRICES DID NOT GO DOWN.

They doubled. And they show no sign of reversing direction. Nonstop flights from Sydney to Honolulu on Hawaiian Air actually disappeared altogether for several weeks. When they came back, it was with a price tag of nearly 3 grand.

It appears that we did that thing that you’re not supposed to do – we unwittingly booked our wedding smack bang during the school holidays in Australia. Evidently, the place to be during school holidays is Honolulu, and the city to fly there from is Sydney.

This burns me for so many reasons, like the fact that we chose our date totally at random, and the fact that we gave ourselves plenty of time so we could avoid mishaps like this. That we made the wrong decision, back in January, because we thought we could save 200 measly bucks.

Now I am plagued with the feeling that there must be some way to beat the system without resorting to a flight to Honolulu via Seoul or San Francisco, but I’m starting to accept that we might have lost this round. I’m trying all of my traveler tricks, like flying from different airports and investigating airlines directly and through search sites, but it’s not working.

As far as travel fails go, this one only hurts in the wallet, so it could be worse. But airlines, I’d like to call your bluff.

Please be bluffing.