Tampa 2021 – Flight Planning

Since we were planning our flights only a few weeks before travel, and most of New England also had the same school vacation, demand and prices were high on tickets.

The boys had soccer on both weekends so we’d need to fly out either Sunday night or Monday morning and return on Friday night or first thing Saturday morning so they wouldn’t miss games. I THOUGHT that would make things cheaper, but it didn’t seem to make much of a difference on prices.

High Prices

The prices were $400-500 round trip per person which was a lot for a 5 day vacation. I looked at alternate airports including Providence RI (about an hour away), Manchester NH (about and hour), but there were long connections out of those airports and they weren’t really any cheaper.

I then thought back to a previous trip we made to Paris. We were using points at the time but couldn’t find an itinerary that worked out of Boston, but were able to fly out of JFK instead. My wife’s family lives around New York so it comes as an excuse to visit them. When I checked prices from the New York airports to Tampa they were closer to $150 round trip per person. Driving 3-4 hours would save a TON of money so I went to work finding flights from there.

Originally I found a flight out of LaGuardia and a return flight to Newark where the times worked well for us. We would fly Monday morning and return Friday evening. We would drive down Sunday night after the soccer games and drive home Saturday morning before the games.

Flexibility is key

I booked the flights using JetBlue points because I knew I could cancel them if I needed to change my mind. Soon after I booked the tickets, my brother in law indicated he’d like to join us on the trip. He’s traveled with us before and the boys LOVE going places with their uncle. He had been vaccinated by that time so there was very little risk on the COVID front as well. We were more than happy to do that, though it did add some logistical complications.

We had originally planned to leave our car with him. He would park it on the street near where he lives and move it on the days the streets are cleaned so it didn’t get towed. If he was with us, that wouldn’t work.

That also meant leaving from LaGuardia and returning to Newark didn’t make a lot of sense. We’d have to leave from and return to the same airport. Fortunately there was a similar Monday morning flight from Newark as we had booked from LaGuardia. Since I had booked the legs of the flights as two one-way itineraries instead of a round trip I was able to cancel just the outbound leg. Booking one way flights it’s actually what JetBlue recommends on their website and it gives you a lot more flexibility to cancel and change your plans if necessary.

I rebooked our outbound leg out of Newark for the 5 of us and booked a single return flight for him on the same flight we were on. There was no need to rebook our return flight to include him on the itinerary.

We had also booked the new outbound leg with cash rather than points in order to use up the Travel Credits we had accumulated because of other flights we had canceled. JetBlue doesn’t give you your money back when you cancel, which is annoying. The travel credits also expire after a year.

The new flights were also booked as the basic economy rate, but since they were still offering free cancelations on those fares it still made sense. Due to our JetBlue credit cards, we would have 4 free checked bags on our flights so we wouldn’t have to worry about having to bring carry-ons.

We finally had our tickets booked. Time to figure out the hotel situation!