Travel Plans

As crazy as it might sound, people are already beginning to make plans to visit and we are really excited about that! Once the SYA school schedule is set for next year we will let people know what it is. That probably won't happen until late May at the earliest. They like to get through this year before they focus too much on next year. Before that, if you want to get an idea, the schedule for the current year is available at the sya.it site linked to the right.

Some things to consider for your planning. International flights are expensive and only going to go higher over the next year. You can thank a weak dollar (the US is printing money as if it was paper) and soaring energy costs (thanks speculators). However, airlines will typically let you book only 11 months or so in advance. You can currently book into mid/late March. You will have to wait until later to book if you want to visit us after that. We had to book our return flight for March which we will have to change. Be VERY careful doing something like that. Switching tickets now costs $150-250 per ticket to change international tickets. For us it turns out to still be less expensive to pay the switching costs, perhaps twice if we stay a second year, versus purchasing a one way ticket now and a second one way ticket when we finally know what our return date will be.

If you don't care what airline you fly, we have had reasonable success going to one of the travel search engines (Expedia seems to work for us) and putting in our search parameters. There is usually somebody having a sale. You can then visit the site for that specific airline to see if there might be even better deals to be had. One advantage to doing it that way is that the airline specific site will often let you look at dates around the date you are interested in if you have some flexibility. Travel search engines rarely allow you to do that easily. Finally, with ticket prices that expensive it makes sense to look into travel insurance if you think there might be any need to switch/cancel your flights in the future.

See you in December Mom!