Seasoned Milongueros know very well that, unless you live in Buenos Aires, travelling to Tango Events is the best way to feed your tango hungry heart with the excitement of meeting lots of other people that share your love for this dance. Unfortunately, Argentine tango is quite a minority dance which results in local tango communities being quite small. So getting out of your home place exposes you to a bigger and better range of embraces beyond what you find in your weekly Friday night Milonga.
But travelling to tango events is not like going on holidays. You go on vacation once a year for two weeks to an exotic destination where you can disconnect from your job, your responsibilities and your mundane routines. However tango travelling is not like that, instead, it is related to your tango addiction and hence you need to do it as often as possible. So it becomes of paramount importance to develop some skills in finding good deals in order to avoid breaking the bank with your frequent flights.
In the following points, we are going to give you a few tips that may help you secure a better price when booking your flights to your next tango destination.
1. Find your next tango adventure
It is quite obvious that before you start researching how to get somewhere you need to know where you are going, but we could not help to take the chance to brag a little about tangopolix tango events directory. If you know us already and you come here often you can skip to the next point, but if you just found us via this article we would like to let you know that in our website you will not only find a complete catalog of tango festivals, tango marathons, tango seminars, etc but also we pride ourselves on being the most comprehensive and easy to use tango agenda thanks to our simple but very powerful search engine that allows our visitors to filter the big amount of tango events we list by their choice of dates, countries, categories, labels, Maestros, registration dates, services, etc
In fact, when we built tangopolix, we took a good amount of inspiration from flight comparison websites since we were amazed at how easy was to find the right flight just by flipping and ticking a few filter options in their search engines. So we followed a similar approach when categorising the hundreds of tango events that are on offer today. Such detailed classification makes it very easy to find a tango event that suits your preferences and, once you find somewhere you would like to go dancing, the next step would be to go to a good flight comparison website.
2. Use the best flight comparison site
Travellers have never had such a big choice of flights and airlines, and as long as you know how to find them, fares have never been cheaper. But hacking down the best prices means finding out which airlines flight to your destination and comparing their offers.
There are many flight comparison websites which are able to perform this laborious task almost instantly for you by simply indicating your origin and destination. However, the results they provide and the options they offer you to then narrow down those results even further is what makes the difference between a good and a mediocre flights search engine.
In our experience and according to a lot of feedback we have received from our users the absolute best website to search for flights at the moment is Skyscanner. It does not only consistently provide the best and most accurate pricing but we also like how clearly the information is presented. It is very easy to change your flying dates by a day with a single click which allows you to see if there is any benefit in rearranging your travelling dates and it also offers you the possibility to apply more conditions like for example: choose only direct flights, restrict the journey duration or avoid difficult departure times. Its quality is illustrated by the fact that many other flight comparison websites source their data from Skyscanner.
So guess what! What if we were to combine the best tango events search engine with the best flights search engine? Said and done! Now in each of the tangopolix events, you will find a small Skyscanner search widget that will allow you to trigger a flights search by looking directly at the details of the tango event of your interest. In this widget, we will pre-populate for you the origin and destination airports which are closer to where you are and to the event’s location, that way you will not need to figure that one out. Simply pick your dates and click search to get a quick idea of the flight expenses required to get to that tango event. And if you want to book the flight just select it and Skyscanner will redirect you to the airline’s website where you will be able to complete the booking.
3. Book at the right time
We normally think that booking your flights very early tends to result in the best pricing, and whilst this is generally true it does not have to be like that in all the routes. If we look at Skyscanner's “best time to book tool” which is based on historic booking pricing from 2014 to 2016 we can find the following examples:
- London to Amsterdam: this route matches our expectations about earlier booking meaning cheaper booking. In particular, booking up to nine weeks before departure has typically provided over 20% cheaper pricing than the average fare for this route. And booking less than 5 weeks in advance has resulted in a price more expensive than the average one.
- London to Barcelona: here things start getting interesting. Historic pricing has been more expensive than average when booking the flight less than four weeks in advance, however the best time to book seems to have been when doing so seven or eight weeks before departure - when fares were around 10% cheaper than average. This contrasts with the fact that if you were to book twice as much in advance (sixteen or seventeen weeks before departure) your fare might have been only 1% cheaper than average.
- London to Ibiza: in this case, if you booked thirteen to twenty-one weeks in advance more than likely you would have paid fares which were more expensive than the average ticket cost for this route, which breaks the rule of earlier means cheaper. And, had you booked later (between twelve and two weeks prior to departure), you would have got a better than average fare - being weeks eight and nine before departure the most favourable cases.
If you want to take a closer look to Skyscanner's “best time to book tool” click on this link.
4. Be the first one to know
Based on the previous point it is clear that airline fares fluctuate over time, and you are not the only one looking for a good deal. Based on this it is quite important to use the right tools to keep you ahead of the game and be able to react quickly in order to score a bargain.
- Skyscanner gives you the option to sign up for price alerts. The basic concept is that you mark a flight that you are interested in and they will email you every day telling you whether the price has dropped, risen, or stayed the same.
- Follow your favourite airlines on social media. Your time on Facebook and Twitter will be well spent if you manage to pick up a deeply discounted flight.
- Use websites specifically designed for last minute travel. Holiday Pirates is a great example. Not only do they source last minute flights, they also give an in-depth description of the offer.
- If an airline has a newsletter, sign up for it. This works particularly well for chartered flights, as they often have spare seats to fill, and the newsletter will keep you informed about flight sales.
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Install Skyscanners app so you can check pricing for flights on the go
Skyscanner Android App Download
Skyscanner iOS App Download
5. Buenos Aires and long-haul
If you love Argentine tango sooner or later you will want to go to Buenos Aires. Only there you will get in touch with the roots and tradition of Tango, see how the best social dancers in the world navigate around a super crowded Milonga or have access to the largest range of quality tango teachers.
Luckily, the concept of low fair flights has recently started being applied to long-haul flights as well and it is not exclusive to short-haul anymore. Some airlines have started experimenting with this idea but we would like to highlight Level in particular which has started operating this month (June 2017) and it is totally committed to making long-haul flights affordable to more people. Level is particularly interesting to tango dancers because one of the first routes they are offering is Barcelona - Buenos Aires. This will allow European Milongueros to get to Buenos Aires in a budget by combining two low fare tickets via Barcelona.
But low fair, long-haul flights are not only useful to get to Buenos Aires. They also open a whole new range of tango events that you can get to without breaking the bank. Level and Norwegian have started offering pretty competitive pricing for some routes connecting Europe and the United States which we hope will translate into more and more Milongueros crossing the pond to meet and dance with fellow tangueros from the other side of the Atlantic.