Problem Solving: Traveling to Isolated Places is Hard!

I am currently preparing for two major trips within the next month. Next week I leave for a 9 day trip to South Africa, and two weeks after that I will head to Palau to visit an old friend from college and swim in Jellyfish Lake. Being in the middle of planning a trip to a very isolated island nation has been extremely difficult. With limited flight schedules coming into and out of the main airport, Koror, it was nearly impossible to find a cheap flight between Saipan, where my friend lives, and Palau. In fact, it was almost the same price to book a flight from Salt Lake City to Koror (a 22 hour flight) as it was to book a flight from Sapian to Koror (a 3-4 hour flight).

If I was going to pay that much for a plane ticket, I wanted it to be worth it. I didn't want to pay close to $1,000 (or more) for a short plane ride! So I rearranged my flights to allow me to stop in a handful of countries for the same price instead.

The Problem
Originally, I had booked a Delta miles award for 70,000 miles to fly from Salt Lake City to Saipan with a layover in Tokyo both ways, and I was going to either pay for a ticket (which I was expecting to be close to $600) or use United miles to travel with my friend from Saipan to Palau. Unfortunately, with the limited number of flights between Saipan and Guam and between Guam and Palau, tickets in March were absurdly high and there was no award availability for the week that I had off work. After a few weeks of waiting and searching for other options, I realized that there was just no way to get a cheap ticket to Palau for the dates that I needed. Isn't it always true that you either have time or money, but never both? This was a case where I didn't have the time to get the cheaper flights, so I was going to have to pay more for this trip than I was expecting. A lot more.

The Solution
Knowing that I would have to pay a lot for flights on this trip, I was looking at canceling my Delta Award flight to get my 70,000 miles back. This was a decision I made knowing that 70,000 Delta miles are worth a lot, even if Delta Skymiles isn't the best rewards program. I can get to Europe with those miles! And if I wasn't going to save very much money by using them to get to Saipan, I would rather keep them for another trip another time.

Having looked at flights from SLC to ROR (Salt Lake City to Palau), I noticed that all of them transited through Taipei, Taiwan, and it just so happens that I have a good friend who is teaching English in Taiwan for six months (his blog about his time in Taiwan and his awesome photography skills can be found here). Knowing that I could take a day or so and visit him in Taiwan on the way, I decided to try a few flight options out.

If you are looking to find a cheaper price on an expensive flight, one of the best things to do can be to break up your flight into smaller segments and purchase tickets that way. 

This is when I busted out all my travel tools. I used every single one of my favorite websites to check for cheaper prices and cheaper segments. I used kayak.com/explore to see if it was cheaper to fly from SLC to any city along the way to ROR. I used airline websites and OTA websites (Online Travel Agencies) like Expedia/Travelocity/Orbitz and looked for both mileage tickets and monetary tickets. I utilized google.com/flights along with matrix.itasoftware.com to price out individual segments versus the full roundtrip ticket, and I even looked into doing several roundtrip tickets (i.e. SLC to Taiwan, then Taiwan to Palau). It was honestly kind of fun, even though it was somewhat stressful since there was the pressure of having to find an affordable ticket.

This will most likely be my trip (Map generated at gcmap.com)

Ultimately, I found a much better deal to combine a roundtrip ticket from SLC to Taipei, which ended up being in the $700-$800 roundtrip range, with a mileage award ticket from Taipei to Palau. In fact, it was only 30,000 United miles for me to fly from Taipei to Palau, and with United miles, they allow a stopover (any stop over 24 hours) in any country along the way as well. I found the price for the SLC to TPE portion of the trip on kayak.com/explore, then found the flight segments on google.com/flights and booked it on an OTA. I got the best price by using a combination of these websites, so it took some playing around with dates and airlines, but I ended up with a schedule I liked.

The mileage ticket from TPE to ROR was an excellent find since it's a minimum of 25,000 miles for a roundtrip domestic flight, so for almost the same price, I was getting an international flight to my final destination plus I could add another stop along the way. As an added bonus, I could choose routings that added long layovers in any other city if United's website offer them. These layovers (under 24 hours) are difficult to force, so most times you just have to be aware of the flight routings you are being offered and make sure you take advantage of them. In this case, I was looking at routing my flight to have a stopover in Seoul to visit one of my uncles there, and it had me stop in Hanoi for a 10 hour layover between Seoul and Taipei on the return ticket. That would have been amazing if I could have made that work, but sadly it didn't.

This COULD be my trip! (Map generated at gcmap.com)

I have decided that I will definitely have a 5 and a half hour layover in Shanghai on my way from Taipei to Palau, but I cannot decide where I want to have a stopover of a day or two on my way back. I am leaning toward stopping in Beijing for a day or two so I can go see the Great Wall of China and Tiananmen Square, although it would be super awesome to see a different country for my stopover (since I will be seeing Shanghai on the way to Palau). And I will have 1-2 days on the end of my trip to spend time my friend in Taiwan. We are thinking of going to see the cherry blossoms in the mountains! I am so excited!

Either way, I really wanted to make sure I get the most for my money on this trip. And by changing my flights up to try to make it worth it, I will get to visit __ places and see more old friends instead of the 3 I was originally planning on visiting. Sometimes flight problems can end up working out in your favor in cases like this :)

Original Trip:                                      What I Ended Up With: ^_^
Tokyo - Layover                                 Taipei - Stopover, "Destination" of first ticket
Saipan - Destination                            Shanghai - Layover
Palau - Second destination                  Guam - Layover
                                                             Palau - Destination
                                                             Seoul - Layover (possibly Stopover)
                                                             Beijing - Stopover