High Fly, Spend Low

“Do you want to go to Dubai in May after our finals finish?” Kathryn J. Gundersen ’17, an inactive FM writer, asked a friend last spring. Five months before this Dubai flight was scheduled for takeoff, on Christmas Day, 2014, Gundersen had discovered a “mistake fare.” She had to act fast.

In May, as planned, Gundersen and her friend arrived in Dubai on plane tickets that cost $200 round trip.

Gundersen uses Facebook pages such as “The Flight Deal” and “Secret Flying” to search for cheaper travel options. These pages mostly post deals for flights that happen to be cheaper than normal, but occasionally they’ll advertise something known as a “mistake fare.” A mistake fare, such as the fare for Gundersen’s ticket to Dubai, can be caused by anything from human error to system glitches, but most of the time is based in “fuel dumping.”

“An airline ticket has two prices,” Gundersen explains. One is the price of the actual ticket, and the other is the price of fuel. The price of fuel is what gives certain flights, especially international flights, their sky-high prices. Fuel dumping, when airlines unintentionally leave the price of fuel off the ticket price, is the main cause of mistake fares.

Gundersen traveled out of North America for the first time in college, and since, she realized that only did she enjoy it, she could do it—cheaply—on her own.

Now, Gundersen’s favorite way to release the tension of a stressful Harvard semester is to “just wander around a new city and have my mind fully on that,” she says.

“Book now. Think later. That’s my strategy,” Gundersen says. Since discovering a passion for travel, she’s made several trips, to places including London, Hong Kong, Tokyo, and Dubai. Her next trip? Lisbon in October, on a ticket she purchased as a mistake fare.

Gundersen notes that early mornings and late nights are best for catching mistake fares on the Facebook pages she frequents, but counts spontaneity as her best strategy.