From the Boston area there are loads of options for getting to London. Not only does London have multiple airports that Boston serves directly (Heathrow and Gatwick), but there are several smaller airports in the Boston area that fly to places in Europe with one short connection to one of the London airports including Providence, Manchester, and Hartford.

Sometimes flying out of a smaller airport can save a lot of money as the airport fees are much less for the airline than at the larger airports. None of the smaller airports had direct flights to London, though so there was a convenience factor that lead us away from those options. Those smaller airports also flew smaller, less comfortable planes and in the end were comparable in price so flying out of Boston would be a much better option.

Searching for Flights

During the summer of 2017 when I was searching for these flights, I was utilizing flights.google.com, which today is my go to tool for flight searches. It was excellent at the time, but didn’t take into account as many of the extra fees (seat assignment, baggage, etc) that it now handles better. It also didn’t have the nice matrix of dates and prices that it has now that makes it easier to find the date combinations that are the cheapest, so I had to individually check several date combinations in order to find the best options.

I knew the week we had school vacation but I still had to figure out the exact dates we would travel. I had a few things to factor in. With my dad’s SPG points, we were hoping to score a stay in a Marriott or SPG property for 5 of the nights, utilizing the 5th night free when staying using points. I also had just gotten a separate credit card that allowed me to get the 4th night free on paid stays (not points stays).

If we stayed 9 nights we’d be able to take advantage of both of those freebies and as it turned out some of the cheapest dates to fly were for a stay that had 9 nights.

I briefly looked at finding ways to use points for at least part of the flights. I noticed that Virgin Atlantic had some cheap off-peak rates for flights using points, but the dates we were going were peak rates (likely due to Easter and the London Marathon). Looking at other rates, it just didn’t make sense to use points based on the cost of paid tickets at the same time.

I came really close to booking an itinerary on British Airways. The price looked low, but as I dug in, the seat assignment costs and the luggage costs made it much more expensive than it first seemed.

I had read about Norwegian which is a low cost carrier that has been expanding rapidly with service to the US, including Boston and Providence. As a low cost carrier, you have to pay for all the extras like a meal, beverage service, seat assignment and luggage (though not carry on or personal items). Even with those extra costs, it was still significantly cheaper than other options.

In addition, since they were in the process of expanding, they had all new planes with a 787 Dreamliner out of Boston. I had been on that type of plane once before for a short domestic flight but it was long enough to know why people\ really enjoyed the type of airplane. It’s quiet, comfortable and would be nearly new.

After evaluating all the other points currencies I had and all the other carriers I could find flying out of Boston, I finally decided this was going to be our best deal.

Booking

In reading several blogs I had seen a tip for getting the tickets for even cheaper than I could directly on the Norwegian US website. If I went to the Norwegian version of the site, I could buy the tickets in Norwegian Kroners. I did the currency conversion and it was about 10% less than the cost in US Dollars.

It was a bit odd buying the tickets, but I used Google Chrome and had it translate the pages for me. While not perfect, I was able to figure it out. I booked the tickets using my Citi Prestige card which has no foreign transaction fees and had a $200 a year airfare credit making the out of pocket price even less. The tickets for the 5 of us ended up being less than $500 each round trip.

I was also able to navigate to select our seats. Seat selection was not free, but since we were buying the tickets early we had our choice of seats. The seat layout on the plane is 3-3-3 so for the 5 of us we got a row of 3 with a window and the adjacent aisle and middle in the center section so we’d be all together. It cost about $300 total for both the outbound and return seat selections for all of us. It wasn’t cheap, but it was still cheaper than the alternatives by quite a bit. Because we were booking so early we got seats in the second row of the economy section.

We would be taking a Thursday night red eye to Gatwick returning the following Sunday afternoon, arriving back in Boston in the early evening.

Now to figure out a flight to get my dad from Myrtle Beach to Boston (and back) for the flight to London.