How Not to Book a Plane Ticket

AKA a case study in indecisiveness
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Back in the day, I used to write a lot of posts on how to book plane tickets. Guess what? Here is how NOT to do it.

Last week I spent an average of two hours a day, every day, looking at various options and putting together itineraries to Croatia before discarding them.

How is such a thing possible, you ask? Because of a combination of factors, most notably a) far too much knowledge of airlines, b) “revenge travel” summer logistics, and c) my own general indecisiveness.

I just couldn’t decide! Nothing was great, so I did … nothing. I first booked a direct flight to Frankfurt, before changing my mind. Then I booked a flight to Paris that had a forced overnight in Chicago O’Hare. Then I cancelled those tickets and looked at approximately 50 others, debating in my mind which was best.

I finally figured it out, of course. Two days before departure I used AA miles to book Dallas to London Heathrow, changing to Gatwick and then connecting on to Split, Croatia. The Dallas stop also had a forced overnight, but that was fine because I got to stay in the DFW Grand Hyatt, my favorite airport hotel.

I got to my destination eventually. And Croatia is beautiful! But yeah, that was a lot of work.

If you too would like to make your life unnecessarily complicated while trying to make a simple decision, I offer you four suggestions.

Protip: you can apply many of them to much more than booking plane tickets. See also: life decisions in general.

Tips N’ Tricks to Travel Procrastinate

• Practice FOMO (hard mode). You’ve heard of FOMO. Take it up a level as you consider different itineraries, factoring in all sorts of things that probably won’t matter much in the end but seem like a huge deal at the time.
• Second-guess yourself. Sure, you looked at dozens of options … but did you really book the best one? Maybe something else was better. Or maybe something else has opened up since you last checked. To be safe, go back and spend another hour looking at everything again. Speaking of options…
• The more options, the better. A good way to NOT make decisions is to keep adding options and choices. This is easy for me with flights: I have miles in most major airline programs, so there’s always something else to check. OneWorld, Star Alliance, SkyTeam, independent airlines, combining awards and/or paid flights across carriers—at one point I had eight tabs open to different sites that I cycled between while refreshing. Like I said, a great way to make things complicated and avoid making a quick decision.
• Miss the forest for the trees. Why was I going to Croatia—was it so I could spend the whole week stressing out about the flight? Apparently so, or so it seemed while I was stuck in my indecisiveness. To apply this more broadly:
  • The forest: everything you really want to do
  • The trees: everything else that surrounds it

It’s all too easy to end up consumed by the minutia of detail that has nothing to do with your actual goal. For best results, focus on the minutia to the point where you forget about the goal.

P.S. The Outcome

It’s not just me: The summer travel season is especially difficult this year. Flights are full, airfares are high, the world has become expensive. Lots of people are unhappy. But guess what?

It really is nice here. I’m glad I came.

P.P.S. Thank you for all your lovely emails last week!

I still have more to go through but it’s really nice to hear from readers. 🙂

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