You Can Always Fly to Europe for $500
Tl;dr: You can (almost) always fly to Europe for $500
Today, I just want to cover a quick and simple travel guideline that is important if you want to travel abroad: you can always fly to Europe for $500.
Why it matters
This is an important thing to be aware of if you’ve dreamed of international travel, as getting to Europe can be surprisingly cheap, and in many places the cost of lodging, activities, and food can be much lower than what you might find on a U.S. vacation. So flying to Europe with cash might be more attainable than you realize.
The $500 rule is also important if you want to use your points to travel to ensure you get good value from your credit card and airline points. Because I know I can always fly to Europe for around $500, I also know that I could book one of those $500 flights with 50k Amex points or 40k Bilt or Chase (with the Sapphire Preferred) points through those bank portals. And with that information, I can easily tell whether I’m overpaying or getting a deal on a points or miles flight to Europe.
Are you near an international airport?
Although not everyone lives close enough to a major airport to conveniently hop on one of these flights, a surprisingly large portion of the population does. It’s no surprise that cheap flights are easy to come by from New York or Los Angeles. I have personally always been able hop onto Google Flights at virtually any time and find a deal from San Francisco or Washington, D.C.
Just to be sure, I ran some quick searches yesterday to make sure this was a widespread phenomenon. Unsurprisingly, it was easy to find sub-$500 flights from major cities and hubs like Boston, Atlanta, and Dallas. Somewhat more surprisingly, Phoenix, Minneapolis, and Tampa had options, too. So too Seattle, St. Louis, and Salt Lake City. Outside of the continental U.S., Anchorage and Honolulu had flight deals as well. As I expanded my search outward, I found that I could even get deals from Buffalo, Bozeman, and Birmingham. I gave up searching after I found flights from Fayetteville, Arkansas to Dublin, Copenhagen, and Nice for under $500. (The only airport I tried that didn’t get a result was the regional airport in Cheyenne, Wyoming.)
Some caveats
As with almost all things in travel, just because something is available doesn’t mean it will be available in exactly the way you might hope. These flights are almost always basic economy (so no changes or assigned seats) and you might not be able to fly on the exact dates you want—these deals are best for flexible travelers. And, of course, these deals will get you somewhere in Europe, but maybe not your first-choice destination.
Of course, you can do what we did a few years ago and use the cheap flight as a springboard. Back then, we took a $440 flight to Lisbon, then flew to Marseille, took a train to Milan via Lyon, and flew back to Lisbon for about $150 in train and air fares.
If you want to book a full economy fare so you can choose your seat (depending on the airline (looking at you, British Airways)) and have cancellation flexibility, if you want to travel to a more expensive destination, or if you want to travel in a premium cabin, maybe $500 isn’t the reference point for you, and using points might be a reasonable way to splurge or could even be more economical than paying cash. For me, though, I would hate to spend 75-100,000 miles on a flight to Europe, even a fancy one, knowing that I could probably book a flight to one of many dream destinations for about $450 (or 36k Bilt points).
Conclusion
If you want to book some European travel or are considering spending more than 50k of your hard-earned points on a flight: you can always get to Europe for $500.