I am going to VEGAS baby!! I am super stoked for the trip as I will be meeting some University friends there. It will be the second time travelling to another country, even if it IS just the US, with friends.
It is a fairly last minute trip considering we only started to plan in the beginning of March, and the trip is during Easter long weekend. We chose this weekend because although it would be expensive, we wouldn't have to book extra days off work.
We started off researching what kind of hotels and flight options were available. Since we lived so closed to the Canada-USA border, we had the choice of flying from Vancouver or Bellingham. These were some of the options that came up on Google Travels:
Flight on Delta Airlines
April 17th 2014
YVR - LAS with layover at LAX
4:00 PM - 9:36 PM
April 21st 2014
LAS - YVR (direct flight)
9:55 PM - 12:41 AM
$622 RT/Person
Flight on Alaska Airlines
April 17th 2014
BLI - LAS (direct flight)
4:35 PM - 7:02 PM
April 21st 2014
LAS - BLI (direct flight)
11:20 AM - 2:03 PM
$530 RT/Person
It was good to see what kind of range we were looking at.
A friend later recommended Allegiant Air, which is a discount airline that caters to smaller cities and airports. A quick search resulted in a deal that had round trip direct flights from Bellingham, and hotel rooms at Treasure Island for $595 per person (excluding resort fees and baggage fees). We were only in our research stage then and hesitated a tad too long and missed out on this pricing. Which worked out in the end because...
Having stalked the Allegiant Air website and various other websites as well that even included promotions such as $10 Petro card for booking through them, I finally managed to find Allegiant's price drop for the first leg from $239 to $189. I knew I had to snatch it up before it rose again, but the return flight was still dead set at $305. At this point, we had three options. either buy it all at once, buy the first leg + hotel together and still get a decent price, and wait on the return flight to drop or buy everything individually, which would give us more freedom to choose which hotel to book.
Option 1. BUY IT NOW. $508.50 RT/Person
April 17th 2014
BLI - LAS
2:45 PM - 5:16 PM
Riviera Hotel and Casino
4/17 - 4/19
April 21st 2014
LAS - BLI
12:20 PM - 3:01 PM
Option 2. BUY ONE WAY + HOTEL NOW. RETURN FLIGHT LATER. $268.20/Person (excluding return)
April 17th 2014
BLI - LAS
2:45 PM - 5:16 PM
Riviera Hotel and Casino
4/17 - 4/19
April 17th 2014
BLI - LAS
2:45 PM - 5:16 PM
Riviera Hotel and Casino via Expedia.ca
4/17 - 4/19
We ended up taking a risk and decided to book everything separately, on the assumption that the price WILL drop.
There was also other options to further bring down the pricing though, even for just a bit such as booking Expedia through www.ebates.ca.
We only booked partially because my cousin lives in Henderson and has offered for us to stay with her for part of our trip. Which works out nicely because we will be taking a day trip to Grand Canyon.
For the deals we found for shows and dinners etc, stay tuned :)
