Mid week flights?

[jpassov]

Need advice from those of you who spend more than 1 week in Bonaire. I can only seem to find flights out from PHX to BON on Friday's (arriving in BON Sat. early AM) and return flights on Saturday's.
We spent a week there last May.
What do we do if we wanted to try to spend 10 days there this time around? (I don't think we can afford 2 weeks!)

 

[Mossman]

Need advice from those of you who spend more than 1 week in Bonaire. I can only seem to find flights out from PHX to BON on Friday's (arriving in BON Sat. early AM) and return flights on Saturday's.
We spent a week there last May.
What do we do if we wanted to try to spend 10 days there this time around? (I don't think we can afford 2 weeks!)

That's one problem with getting to Bonaire.

One solution is to take one of the local airlines (Insel, Divi Divi, or DAE) from Curacao or Aruba. Insel also flies to Charlotte. More info here:

Info Bonaire - Airline Information and Connections

 

[mathauck0814]

With any airfare, your best bet is to fly on a Tuesday and spend at least one Saturday stay. That said, we spent close to $800/per for tickets to Curacao last year using those rules. It's just getting more expensive to fly. Good news is that it's getting cheaper to stay in a lot of places.

 

[jpassov]

Thanks guys. That's pretty much what I figured. Looks like 1 week will still be the best bet. Least amount of travel anyhow.

 

[chauncy19]

jpassov,
just did the AA to curacao and insel to bonaire trip. its not as bad as feared. however I am going for the red eye next time. this has more to do with ff miles than anything. bonaire is not easy to get to but worth it for me. problem for us is we have to stay at hotel the night before on both legs. might be different if we were not using ff miles to curacao and flying out of Boston. Not an issue with the red eye.

 

[rlskill1]

Insel Air does (for the most part) daily flights from MIA(Miami) to CUR(Curacao). You could then pick-up a small prop flight from CUR to BON. Then reverse the process to return home. Departure tax is much cheaper this way also.

 

[diversteve]

You can fly Saturday 14h45m - stops in CLT and MIA first. returning on Wednesday 14h27m - 3 stops - CUR, MIA, CLT (for $1396). 1 short connection - 57min. in CLT on the return. I used mid-June - I noticed there were some $969 fares in May but the flight times were closer to 18hrs. each way. Or an overnite.



Go here and enter your dates: http://matrix.itasoftware.com/search.htm

Different starting/ending days will yield completely different results. You can also tweak stops or total duration etc. in the results screen. If you're flexible on days check see calendar of lowest fares on the first screen - it will expand the screen and you can specify a date and/or length of stay.

This is the data aggregation site for most of the major airlines and travel portals but you can't book thru them.

They show Insel - and DAE? - but afaik not Divi or Tiara.

 

[TheWizard]

AA flies twice daily MIA-CUR, in addition to Insel, so routing via MIA is your answer to flying any day of the week.
Matrix doesn't seem to show connections to Insel in MIA, so you may have to construct that yourself.
And you may have to fly overnight from PHX to get some connections in MIA, especially the AA flight that arrives CUR mid afternoon.

Getting between CUR & BON is trickier; only Insel is shown on most search engines. DAE doesn't presently fly CUR-BON but that could change. Divi-divi is another good option, along with another hidden line called EZ-air...

 

[jpassov]

Thanks for all the advice! We ended up booking yesterday, but we could only afford 1 week, so we went with the standard Continental(United) flights.