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Overseas
flight travel up from last summer On the afternoon of April 11, Katie Childress and three of her friends gathered in her room with one goal in mind: buy their airplane tickets to London. Almost two hours later, their mission was complete; they were all booked on the same flight. Now, all they had to do was wait until August. “I’m flying to London to study for the semester at the TCU London Centre,” said Childress, a sophomore English major. “I bought early because I thought it would be a good idea to have everything set before summertime.” It may seem like Childress and her friends are getting started early, but this year’s strong increases in travel sales over last year indicate that students who wait too long to book their trips could find them sold out, said Harvey Boysen, vice president of Gulliver’s Travel Service, Inc. “Somehow people get the impression from a lot of the media that nobody is going anywhere and so there’s great deals out there to go anywhere cheaply,” Boysen said. “That just isn’t true.” Boysen said travel sales began to pick up at the beginning of the year. He said that this increase, which comes after a three-month drop in sales following Sept. 11, shows that people are becoming more comfortable with traveling again. “I’m sure that there are a few people out there that are still scared, but most are not,” Boysen said. “After the first of the year, it’s like everybody either forgot or they decided they were going to live with it and go on.” Boysen said too often people miss out on opportunities because they put off making travel arrangements so they can look for deals. “If you book early, the price may go down, but you’ve got it secured and you know what you’ve got,” Boysen said. “If you wait for the price to go down, you may not get it because it may not be available.” Childress said that after she looked at a number of Web sites to find the best deal she could, she finally found a good price at a student travel site. “I’m
happy with the price I found,” Childress said. “I figured
Cindy Boyd, a travel agent at Forest Park Travel Inc., said remaining open about the travel date and destination makes it much easier for people to find deals, said. “If you have your heart set on going to a particular place and you’re happy with the prices but just hoping it will go down, it may be smarter to just go ahead and buy it,” Boyd said. “If you aren’t really concerned, you just want to go somewhere this summer, it may pay to wait to be flexible and just wait on a sale to come along.” Boyd said to get cheaper fares and to avoid crowds of people who are trying to take fewer days off work, it is best to fly on a Sunday, Monday or Wednesday that isn’t near a holiday. Laura
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